Kids Who've Stepped Back From The Brink

by Julia Steiny

It's a little ridiculous to compare such different schools, but like the Textron/Chamber of Commerce Academy, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (AKA the MET) seems to specialize in bringing disaffected students back into a learning fold. Given the high social cost and large number of high school drop outs, retrieving lost lambs is an invaluable educational service -- for which both schools are to be commended.

Interestingly, the student population at the two schools is rather different. Both new, highly innovative programs have school-to-work, career and technical strategies, but the MET's program -- whose approach we'll examine next week -- attracts an impressively motley group of students from a soup-to-nuts range of backgrounds. Some students come from single-parent families struggling with urban poverty, and others come from two professional incomes, two-car garage kinds of backgrounds, with all sorts of other students in between.

What they all have in common is that the MET intrigued them back to the land of the learning. Allow me to introduce a few of them.

Mia Trindade was presenting an end of the year summation of her work, called an exhibition. All students do three exhibitions a year to which their parents, mentors and friends are invited. Trindade herself is a trip. She gestures dramatically with vampirically long, banana yellow nails, tossing her bleached blond corn-rows which cascade beyond her shoulders with the help of extenders. Trindade would like to be an actress.

She speaks of herself in the third person as in: "Mia is not big on doing community service. When Mia works, she gets paid. But Mia learned that you don't have to get paid to get paid. Not everything is monetarial."

Trindade worked with City Year cleaning up Marsh Pog pond, among other projects. "Mia's not big on the cleaning and weeding thing. But I could see how much I could make a difference."

Trindade had been to both Cranston high schools without any success. A history teacher suggested the MET to her and she figured she'd drop out and maybe get a GED if the MET didn't work out. In fact, in the last year she had a job at Domestic Bank, worked with Planned Parenthood, did her own
taxes as one of several math projects designed to fill in some holes in her math education, and she knuckled under to the bother of re-writing and proof-reading her papers.

Perhaps her biggest achievement was the conquest of her poor work ethic. "You ask me to do work; I have two choices: I do it or I don't. If I do it, you accept it or get over it. But now you (a teacher) come and tell me you don't like it." She gestures her fury. "I spent an hour of my life
that I'll never get back!" She gestures indignation, but composes herself. "I don't think I cared about learning, so I didn't know what I didn't know. I can strive now because I want more things. When I came to the MET, all I wanted to do was to chill and have fun. I never thought about what I wanted to do in the long run. I just thought of what I wanted to do in a couple of hours."

Misty Wilson is, in some ways, the opposite of Trindade. Quite, soft-spoken, very much a good girl, Wilson was an average student at a junior high in Pawtucket. She had dreams of becoming a singer, but she wasn't assertive about pursuing her dreams, nor did the school nurture those dreams. At the MET her enormous talents for leadership bloomed. She started a Youth In Action group that goes around the city in a variety of service projects. The school connected her with Rose Weaver, the actress and singer, who became her mentor, job shadow and friend. Wilson was invited to sing with Shade of Brown, and she won a full scholarship to a performing arts camp in Colorado. She'll be flying for the first time.

Wilson says, "When I came to the MET, the way I wrote was the way I spoke. All slang with a lot of gonnas and wannas. Danique (teacher and advisor) assigned me to do a slang dictionary and encouraged me to find new words. Slowly but surely, I've improved over the last year, the language, the words, even the length of sentences." Wilson's mother beamed throughout her exhibition; her daughter beamed back.

Another student, Conor Walsh, had been bored to death in an impressive number of schools. "I'm, like, a gifted student, so I would usually already know what they were trying to teach me, especially in math and computers. Anything not interesting they had to force me to do. Here at the MET, I've learned a lot of writing. My social skills have improved too. I get a long with people a lot better this year. The MET encourages community a lot." To this, student Steven Prak adds a heartfelt, "Amen."

In his internships, Walsh was able not only to learn a lot more about computers themselves, but also about real life office environments, how they run and, frankly, how he could run them better. He's had several paid internships, since in spite of his age he brought significant computer skills to the jobs. He earned enough money to take his mother on a dream trip to Ireland, which the MET staff indicated was not the sort of thing that would have occurred to him prior to his work on his social skills.

Eric Oliveras' mother brought her children to RI to escape the violence of New York City. He was enrolled in a Providence middle school where, according to him, "it was more quieter, but it was basically classes and books, really boring. Everything you learned, you'd forget in a week.
When we first came to the MET, my mother liked it a lot. She liked the parent community. She comes to all my exhibitions, and she likes the weekly newsletter, and she loves being so involved. I like it because it is small and because from the very first day it was up to the students to plan our own education and make it our responsibility. That gets you ready for the real world. We learn great organizational skills. Planning your week is learning to survive out there in that hard world."

Oliveras took advantage of the many travel possibilities. He's been on a Maine Outward Bound trip, went to New Mexico for a conference and won a scholarship to a performing arts school. He'd like to be an actor or an architect.

Steven Prak describes himself as having been a "perfect attendance student, an honor roll student, but not in the gifted program (in a Providence middle school) because I didn't want to work harder. I had lots of conflicts with other students – fighting and stupid things. My parents came to a MET orientation, but they didn't like that it wasn't structured. They know me and I mess around a lot and take advantage of things. But I liked the school, liked being responsible for my own education. You have to prioritize your life. No college professor is going to be on your back about your homework. I wasn't challenging myself. "A"s and "B"s don't say nothing about me. I like the narratives that say something about me. I want to own my own business with my own clothing line with Prak Attack Shoes. Many dreams, many passions, dentist, doctor, astronomer."

A year or two ago these kids were bored and looking for stimulation in all the wrong places. Today they're turned on about their lives and the infinite possibilities in front of them. Next week we'll take a look at the program that brought about such sea changes.