In Calif., students battle wildfires, obstacles to learning

Charter school is last resort for many left behind

Members of the California Conservation Corps, backing up firefighters, worked a fire line near Anderson in July. (Robert Durell/ Los Angeles Times)

FRENCH GULCH, Calif. - Alex Gowan leaned against the side of the White Rhino. The bleached workhorse of a bus had strained up a steep fire road to carry him and his fellow members of the California Conservation Corps to this wide, bulldozed bluff in the smoke-shrouded mountains west of Redding.

Gowan was a high school dropout whose quest to get a diploma had led him here, to the edge of the Motion Fire, or what remained of it after weeks of firefighting. The same was true for most of the 18 corps members with him, a weary bunch who had been pulling 16- and even 24-hour shifts working backup behind firefighters from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the US Forest Service.

In addition to being members of the Cs, as they call the Conservation Corps, many of these young people were students or recent graduates of one of the most unusual schools in California: John Muir Charter, a program that offered a last chance to defy the odds and succeed.

"I got in trouble back in my wilder, younger days" said Gowan, 19, a laconic guy in dusty green pants. "I just never really liked the whole school situation." He ticked off the schools in the Redding area that he attended and left: Foothill, New Tech, Foothill again, Pioneer, North State Adult Education, "and then I sort of dropped off the map."

Lete Sanchez, also 19, strolled by. Her grin threw dimples onto cheeks caked with dust and grime. Funny and self-assured, with a fondness for Led Zeppelin and chain saws, Sanchez had bounced around, too, until she wound up in "one of those continuation schools - you know, [where] you can do what you want, they just give you a packet and send you in a corner."

"It was pretty lame," she said. So she quit.

What brought both of them back was the Conservation Corps and Muir - and the maturity to see that they were going nowhere without a high school diploma.

"Turns out," Gowan said, "that piece of paper will get you places."

By some measures, Muir sounds like a losing proposition, a school whose own dropout rate actually exceeds its enrollment (a bit of statistical gymnastics made possible by the way the state calculates the rate). When, earlier this year, the California Dropout Research Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara released a ranking of the state's schools by the number of dropouts, Muir was perched on top.

As is so often the case in education, the numbers don't really tell the story.

On average, students have dropped out of school 2 1/2 times before they enroll at Muir. And once there, many drop out again.

Dean Ravencroft, 21, joined the corps last September and began attending Muir. That ended in February, when he was kicked out of the corps - and Muir - for poor attendance. He was allowed back in July, just in time to join hundreds of corps members who were providing support services to firefighters battling the wildfires raging throughout Northern California.

That meant that Ravencroft had contributed to Muir's dropout rate, even though he was back in school and determined to stick it out. "I feel I've matured," he said, taking a break from his work at a fire base camp in Anderson, just south of Redding. "I have a better head on my shoulders."

Ravencroft grew up in a foster home in Yreka and didn't have much use for school. He had a particularly hard time with math, especially algebra. But his teacher at Muir worked with him and taught him "little shortcuts that most teachers would never teach you," he said. Algebra began to make sense.

Still, he said, Muir isn't for everybody. "It works for people who have the will," he said. "You can't just sit there and expect your schoolwork to get done. You've got to move your pencil."

Reading out loud during class, Joshua Smith struggled to sound out words such as "pushed" and "distance." A polite, well-spoken 21-year-old who is ordained as a minister of a nondenominational Christian church, he has severe dyslexia and reads at about a second-grade level.

Smith said he was in his fourth year at Natomas High School when he dropped out. How did he ever get that far?

He doesn't have an answer. "Once I got to high school," he said, "no one really helped me with the learning disability anymore."

His teacher, Norma Nailor, has an idea: Before the California High School Exit Exam became a requirement for graduation last year, she believes, schools could pass along students who lacked basic skills. "The exit exam is the first real roadblock that has stopped them from going forward without being able to read," she said.