PACT (People Acting in Community Together) organized a Nov. 15 summit meeting to address the county's dwindling alternative education programs, which have been cut by 43 percent in recent years. More than 300 people packed the meeting, held at Westminster Presbyterian Church.

"We're here to ask trustees from our two largest school districts and our state legislators [to help us find] the best educational option for each and every student," said PACT organizer April Lussier.

PACT member Mike Medina said 1,500 high school students drop out each year in Santa Clara County. These dropouts, he added, make up two-thirds of the county's prison population.

"Our vision is to create more alternative schools and lower the dropout rate," Medina said.

Creating more schools

Since the state froze funding levels for alternative schools in 1996, the Santa Clara County Office of Education has reduced its staff for these programs from about 220 to 75. The COE operates alternative education programs at 15 sites in the county, including juvenile detention facilities.

PACT asked the assembled politicians and district administrators to pledge support for the creation of more alternative schools, with small class sizes, counseling and other programs to help at-risk students.

"They cost a lot more to run than traditional schools," Medina said, about $11,000 per student per year. Alternative schools receive $8,000 per student per year in state funds, while public schools get about $6,000.

While community day schools receive an additional $3,000 per student from the state to cover costs associated with their extended hours, charter schools, such as those recently established by both the San Jose Unified and East Side Union High School districts, don't get this extra funding even though they're designed to serve the same at-risk students. At the PACT meeting, state Sen. Elaine Alquist and state Assemblymember Joe Coto both pledged to work toward increasing funding for charter schools to the same level.

Foundry a role model

PACT has focused much of its two-year effort to bolster alternative education on the Foundry, a 31-year-old community day school overseen by the COE. The Foundry is in temporary quarters on the former site of McKinnon School while its Sunol Street campus undergoes remodeling.

George Contreras, 18, attended seven high schools in 21Ž2 years before enrolling at the Foundry. He graduated last June and is now a college freshman.

"The small class sizes and the teachers' experience with kids like me made me feel I wasn't alone in the world," Contreras said at the PACT meeting.

John Malloy, a counselor who helped establish the Foundry in 1974, said the programs there should be used as a model for other community day schools. Students, Malloy added, "will follow you into safe schools."

Malloy was the focus of a PACT campaign two years ago to keep the Foundry's staff and programs from being cut. The COE laid off one of the Foundry's four teachers, assigned Malloy to multiple campuses and contracted with licensed counselors to run programs previously headed by teaching staff.

"The administration felt we were illegal in a lot of things we did, and we needed to be brought into compliance," Foundry teacher Mike Smith said after the meeting. "John Malloy still runs a parent group, but this year parents couldn't come unless they had a student enrolled. It was open to everyone before."

Colleen Wilcox, Santa Clara County superintendent of schools, said the COE wanted to ensure that counselors at the Foundry had appropriate credentials.

"The nature of some counseling occurring with the teachers was somewhat questionable in terms of their credentials," Wilcox told The Resident. "We wanted to make sure we had a whole possible range of credentials to assure discussion of [topics such as] family issues and drug awareness."

Pledging change

Despite his disappointment with the changes at the Foundry, Smith said he was encouraged by what he heard from the politicians and administrators at the PACT meeting.

"I didn't hear lots of equivocating," he said. "They meant what they said."

At the meeting, Alquist and Coto said they'd work to remove any roadblocks to creating alternative schools from the state's education code. Smith said it's imperative that the state Legislature address these legal issues

"There needs to be a paradigm shift in education," he told The Resident. "Test scores are driving education in California these days. That's what didn't work, and we're being told to give kids more of what didn't work."

SJUSD Superintendent Don Iglesias said the state should also change the way it funds alternative education. More than 1,000 students are enrolled in the district's alternative education programs, which include one community day school. At the PACT meeting, Iglesias said the district has run these programs at a $200,000 deficit for the last four years, in part because of the high mobility and truancy rates among the students it serves. Last year, he added, 250 students were enrolled at the school throughout the year, but the district only received funding for the 90 who attended for the full school year.

Unless the state provides funding for all students who come through alternative education programs, Wilcox said, these programs will continue to be underfunded.

These students by and large weren't going to school at all or were going very infrequently, she added. "We're looking at 75 percent attendance rate [in our programs], which is certainly better than their attendance before, but grossly inadequate for us to staff qualified teachers," Wilcox added. "We're working with students who haven't been successful in the regular educational system and who need a great deal of energy to become successful students."

Alternative education programs, Wilcox said, require much lower class sizes and well-trained teachers and counselors.

"These things aren't difficult to come by except that they're expensive, and the resources provided by state fall woefully short," she added. "Anything legislators can do to find more funding would be extremely helpful."