Sennatra Priester woke up later than usual. She dressed slowly, took her time doing her hair and makeup. It was her first day of high school, but she wasn’t concerned with looking good for her classmates.
She was afraid.
Hands clasped in her lap, Priester shifts slightly on the brown couch in her family room. The 18-year-old tells stories about middle school. The group of girls who tried to choke her. The daily threats. The physical abuse.
She didn’t understand why.
During the first week of high school, Priester found any excuse to miss the bus. It worked. She never stepped foot in Gibbs High School. That was almost four years ago.
Today, she is three days away from graduating from the Life Skills Center, an alternative charter school in downtown St. Petersburg, Fla. With her credits fulfilled, Priester has more pressing matters on her mind.
“I don’t have an outfit for graduation,” Priester says with arms crossed, mugging a pout before she laughs. “I’m trying to get one, but I’m a little on the broke side right now.”
She might not have her dress yet, but she has a vision.
Elegant. Classy. Polka dots.
Priester is one of 33 graduates who walked across the stage at the Palladium Theater this week. The Life Skills Center, one of 37 nationwide, provides an alternative education for students ages 16 through 21 who have not excelled in traditional public school settings. Like any public school, the Life Skills Center is state-funded and free. But as a charter school, it has greater freedom with its structure and classroom approach.
June’s graduation marks the greatest number of students to earn diplomas since the Life Skills Center of Pinellas County opened in 2005.
Life Skills will undergo an expansion this summer, adding enough computer stations to accommodate 250 additional students by the fall. Right now Life Skills is at full capacity with 400 students.
The expansion reflects the growing popularity of charter schools amid widespread disenchantment with the traditional public school system. The Florida Department of Education reports that the number of charter schools in Florida has grown from five to more 356 since 1996, with over 40 new charter schools opening in the past year alone.
Since the charter school movement is still young, however, there is debate surrounding the effectiveness of these nontraditional settings.
But for Priester, the Life Skills Center was the answer.
Priester sits poised on the couch with legs crossed. The family room is dim. Beneath the window lies a twin-sized mattress with a rumpled sleeping bag and several neatly folded blankets. Her voice is calm as she recounts her experiences at Tyrone Middle School. Deflated by the bullies and problems at home, Priester drew inward. She didn’t stand up for herself. She got pushed around.
As a result, her grades suffered. In sixth grade, she started off with mostly C’s. By the end of the year she was making F’s. “My mind wasn’t on education at all,” she said. “I was trying to fix the things that was going on in my life.”
By eighth grade, Priester had started to rebel. “I just didn’t care anymore,” she says. “I was like, maybe if I act out or be rebellious then they’ll pay attention to me.”
Her parents, Robbie Reid and Loneryl “Dee” Reid, met repeatedly with teachers and school administrators to address the situation, but to no avail. Robbie Reid said he lost faith in the public school system.
“We don’t really think they were serious about educating our kids,” he said.
After Priester refused to go back to public school, her parents decided to homeschool her. For three years, she studied under the direction of her mother and made friends with other homeschooled kids in the area. She lived in a rough neighborhood, where people told her she would never get a high school diploma.
“A lot of the girls around here are pregnant, already have children,” Priester said. “You know, I just see the struggle and I don’t really want to go through it ’cause I don’t like what I see. I don’t want to be in that situation.”
Priester’s parents were strict and always stressed the importance of education. They didn’t want her to repeat their mistakes.
Dee Reid was seven months pregnant with Priester when she walked down the aisle for her high school graduation. Though she was allowed to participate in the ceremony, she had to spend two years at junior college before she got her high school diploma because she failed to meet all requirements.
Reid said she likes to keep it “raw and uncut” with her daughters when it comes to discussing men, because she would rather them learn it from her than out on the streets.
“That’s one of my accomplishments, that she didn’t get pregnant during her school years,” Reid said of Priester, her oldest daughter.
One of the biggest challenges of homeschooling was the expense, said Robbie Reid, a cable construction lineman. Between providing for the family and paying off bills and debts, money for education materials was tight.
“With homeschooling,” he said, “you are the school system.”
Priester’s mother heard about the Life Skills Center from her next-door neighbor, also a homeschool mother. The Reids wanted Priester to get her diploma from an accredited high school. Returning to public school was not an option.
“We wanted a system that knew how to get her graduated,” Robbie Reid said.
To graduate from the Life Skills Center, students must earn 24 credit hours in traditional high school subjects and electives, including courses in life management skills and practical arts. As with any public school, the students must also pass the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, FCAT, which measures student performance in writing, reading and mathematics.
The Life Skills Center has three classrooms, Triumphant, Victory and Excel, with about 30 computer stations at each. Students are allowed to listen to music on their MP3 players while they complete their computer-based assignments. Four teachers are assigned to each classroom to provide individual help to students.
Michael Stubbs, 35, a math teacher at Life Skills for two years, gained the nickname “Coach” because of his hands-on teaching style. He serves not only as a teacher, but also as a mentor and friend to many of his students, who come to him with personal or family problems.
“I’ve lived the street life,” he said. “I know what it’s like and I know that if I’m able to change, they are able to change.”
There are no grade levels at the Life Skills Center. Upon enrollment, each student receives Individualized Academic and Career Plan based upon their needs. In order to fufill credits, students attend class for four hours a day, five days a week, including the summer. Most students transfer the credits they earned in high school and apply them to their graduation requirements at Life Skills. Students must also maintain good attendance and work or volunteer for a period of 90 days before graduating.
For Priester, that meant a short stint at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The Pinellas County Life Skills Center is still new, only two years in operation. After its first year, the school met only 69 percent of the criteria outlined in the Federal No Child Left Behind Act to gauge adequate yearly progress. The data for the 2006-07 year is still
being evaluated.
Due to its emphasis on targeting at-risk students and high school dropouts, it is difficult to do a straight comparison between Life Skills and other schools in the county and state. Each year, an independent evaluator analyzes student performance and determines whether a school needs to reevaluate its goals. Life Skills is using the data from the first year served as a baseline for future improvement.
Though homeschooling allowed Priester to rebuild her confidence and forge a close relationship with her mother, she closed up again when she started at Life Skills last fall. She seldom spoke. She answered with barely audibly, one-word answers only.
Supportive teachers and a safe environment helped Priester open up.
“After a while I started breaking out of my shell,” Priester said. “I met a lot of my friends at Life Skills. The people who mean the most to me came from Life Skills.”
With the help of the Life Skills staff, Priester applied to college in December but has yet to be accepted. If all goes well, she will attend St. Petersburg College for two years before transferring to University of South Florida and get a degree in elementary education.
“None of my family members have graduated from college,” Priester said. “Most dropped out from high school. I want to be someone to say I made a difference in the family.”
But in the meantime, she is looking forward to her graduation party, which her mother insists on throwing. Though the party was her mother’s idea, Priester admits that she’s looking forward to it.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll get funky and fresh for the party. Have some fun.”
