'I just want to get out of school'

MELROSE -- Shivering teenagers, few clad in the winter gear the suddenly frigid weather seems to dictate, stream into Melrose High School for the 7:40 a.m. start of another day. Danielle Sullivan, fulfilling a condition of what she dubs her "house arrest," checks in with the principal's secretary before heading to first-period Legal Issues. Joyce Rebidue, a takeout coffee cup in her hand as she enters algebra, appreciates the ride her mom's been giving her as an antidote to tardiness ever since she had two Fs on her first-quarter report card.

The line of not-too-late latecomers waiting for passes from the school receptionist stretches across the lobby until 8 a.m., but there's no queue when Matthew Howard arrives at 8:25. Brian Smith and Greg Guyott are absent, the former home sick and the latter suspended after bolting with friends when the school was short-staffed because of traffic caused by a sudden snow squall.

For these five students, getting to school on time, or almost on time, or at all, is a sign of progress on what has been a bumpy road to graduation. While their classmates fret over college applications, their challenge is to stay focused on the high school diploma. While 110 seniors, 45 percent of the class of 2004, landed on first-quarter honor rolls, these students struggle to recover from failing one or more courses when they can ill afford an F at all. While some of their older siblings could graduate with 20 credits, they need 24, plus 48 hours of community service, not to mention MCAS, which all the seniors mentioned here have passed.

For whatever reason -- problems at home, immaturity, adolescence itself, school itself -- they arrived in September with too many absences and too little schoolwork on their records. Now, with the fresh start of a new year behind them and the chill of a long winter ahead, they have time enough to recover from any mistakes.

"A high school diploma is something you need to move on to the next step of your life. I don't want to move on to the next step without finishing this one," Guyott says. "But it's more frustrating and aggravating than I thought it would be."

Guyott, a fifth-year senior who didn't have enough credits to graduate last June, thinks daily of dropping out but hasn't. "My father," he says, "just thinks it's pointless for me to be in school. Basically, he just wants me to grow up and get a job instead of being in high school for five years."

Smith, a former member of the class of 2004, has quit school twice, which is why he's a year behind. But there they both are in the bleachers, in the seniors' section, Smith engulfed in a red Red Sox sweatshirt, when senior girls in hot pink T-shirts beat the juniors, 51-28, in powder-puff football. "I have to root for the seniors," Smith says. "It's my class."

Two years ago, Smith marked his 16th birthday by moving into an apartment and quitting school. "My parents wanted me to stay home, but I didn't want to live with their rules," he says. "We'd argue all the time. We were insulting each other just to get back at each other."

The real world proved no easier than school. Smith drifted from job to job, in a fast food restaurant, in a supermarket. "I wasn't very good at showing up on time," he says. "I didn't know how hard it was going to be." Half a year later, evicted for not paying his rent, he moved back home. "I felt like I failed." He tried high school again, less than halfheartedly, and by spring stopped going altogether.

Now he's back yet again, choosing school over the job his mom said he'd have to get, feeling his time away from home "really benefited all of us." Admitted as a junior, not an 18-year-old sophomore, he must pass everything, including the MCAS he missed last year. "Now," he says at mid-quarter, "I'm really trying hard."

At term's end, he's failed his first-period class in early childhood for being late too often. According to school rules, you fail if you're absent more than six times in a quarter, and three tardies equal one absence. "That," Smith says, "is probably the rule I hate the most." In English, he neglected to make up two quizzes and to do a major writing assignment. "I'm upset at myself," he says. "I started slacking."

"Two years ago I felt we were walking into a long, dark tunnel and there was no light at the end," says his mother, Marie Smith, 47. "Now I feel like we may not be out of the tunnel, but we sure must be near the end of it."

Working overtime

In a year of nostalgia as well as dreams, Sullivan, in big hoop earrings, listens quietly as classmates laugh over memories of a shared childhood, of snowball fights and stolen Fritos and the kid who put carrots up his nose.

Sullivan remembers none of this. She moved here last year from Medford and felt so out of place that she rarely came to school her junior year. She not only needs to pass every class this year but also must earn an additional 1 1/2 credits in order to graduate. First quarter, she was late so often she failed Legal Issues. The F in English? She says she didn't exactly do all the work.

"I'm not going to lie to myself. I knew what I was doing and which class I wasn't going to," she says. "I just want to get out of school. I know I say that all the time, but I feel like I've been in high school forever."

In November, principal Daniel Burke helps devise a plan to propel Sullivan to a June graduation. In addition to signing in each morning, she must see him after school any day she's tardy -- the day, for instance, when she forgets to set the first of two alarm clocks. She starts a science course in night school in Woburn and will perform an extra 30 hours of community service at the YMCA where she has a part-time job answering phones. She's also developing the habit of attending school regularly and doing all her homework. No wonder she sounds harried.

"It's harder when you're not used to it," she says.

Burke is a tough-love principal, a big man with a big voice who launches Sullivan with a few days of 7 a.m. detention. Students who sleep through his Saturday morning detention try to avoid him on Monday. "He has the school in a choke chain," Guyott complains.

Burke also seeks creative ways to help struggling students graduate. "A high school kid ought to be able to make a mistake and make up for it," he says. "When something as rudimentary as high school is an insurmountable hurdle, then the school system has a moral obligation to help those kids, just like we give the really smart ones really, really hard AP courses."

For Howard, Burke offers the chance to earn missing credits with evening courses at Bunker Hill Community College. Howard is an alternative education student trying to get to school by 8:15, the goal set by his program. He's finally attending his TV class after realizing the teacher noticed his absences. The Bunker Hill courses will be a big step for someone who's never really liked school and was thinking more about a job in a music store than about college.

"I'm kind of nervous," Howard says. "It's going to be a totally different setting with people I don't know and classes I don't know anything about. But it sounded pretty cool that I can get used to the whole college thing early."

If Howard wants encouragement, he should talk with Christina Marshall. She started high school determined to graduate with her class even though she was held back in eighth grade, to her ongoing chagrin. Her parents were getting divorced, which "still aggravates me to this day," she says. "I was in a really bad relationship," she adds. "It was just mentally and emotionally dragging me down. I'd go to school every day. I just wouldn't do my homework."

So she's simultaneously doing her junior year at Melrose High and her senior year at Bunker Hill, taking three college courses first semester and one next. "I know there are people who say I can't do it," she says, "but I proved them all wrong."

Passing the time

Outside the library at Melrose High, students hang between periods, Guyott and Smith and Rebidue and Sullivan among them, cutting it so close they're sometimes late to their next class. Guyott is lanky, sociable, with earrings and a habit of wearing a rubber band around his wrist, this one imprinted with "Just Say No to Drugs" because he couldn't find one with "What Would Jesus Do?" He lost last year in a haze of marijuana smoke.

"Last year was ridiculous. I was smoking weed before school and during school. I'm not doing that anymore," he says. "I had four different friends who had cars. Every block somebody was leaving. I could depend on somebody not going to class."

As upbeat as he is in September, telling hall monitors to be sure to shoo him to class, by Halloween he laments a long year. "I expected it to go by faster. It's not like I have unbelievably hard classes," he says. "For some reason, I always do something stupid. I say I'm not going to smoke cigarettes in school anymore. Then it felt like such a long day, I can't wait another hour."

A few weeks later, he's kicked out of his house in a conflict with his father, he says. Staying with a friend who's stopped coming to school, his absences mount. After two weeks, he's back home in what he calls a "truce" with his dad. "To be successful, I need to live there," he says.

His parents decline to be interviewed, but his guidance counselor, Maura Quinn, worries. "I will go to any length to help him," she says, speaking with his permission. "But he needs to do some soul-searching about how much effort he's willing to put in."

Guyott also dreams of playing high school baseball, which means he must pass five courses both this term and next. "It would make me more motivated. If I miss school, I can't go to practice and can't go to games," he says. "All my teachers tell me they can see the change from last year. Somebody from the outside might not see it, but if you were here past years and saw all the write-up slips on me and how many I have this year . . ."

A year that drags for Guyott is "flying by" for Rebidue, a self-described "party girl" who's not sure how she passed her freshman and sophomore years. "I'm almost scared I don't have a chance to get a fresh start," she says.

When her English teacher sets up a Socratic discussion of "Go Ask Alice," the classic anonymous diary of a teenage addict, Rebidue volunteers. "Maybe she's jealous that she can't be perfect," she offers. "Maybe that's why she turned to drugs."

Rebidue's another one who needs every credit, and then some, to graduate; who fails algebra and geometry first quarter; who zigzags between being disappointed one day with an 80 on an English paper she really worked on and being suspended another day for leaving school for a cigarette. "There are days," she says, "when I'm having a wicked bad day."

Her mother, a former machinist, has been so sick with emphysema and other ailments that she hasn't worked in two years. "My stepfather," Rebidue says, "is busting his [butt] for my family." Her mom still smokes. "My father is in and out of my life," she says. "I have a lot of anger toward my parents, I guess -- my mom because I'm scared for her."

More than a third of the school year has passed, and Rebidue's mom, Yvonne Kittredge, 40, nurses hopes of a graduation party in the Elks Hall. "Joyce usually starts out good and then plummets," she says. "She says she'll try harder. I want to believe her."

"I screwed up first quarter," Rebidue says. "Second quarter is my fresh start."