ELYRIA — He won’t sit still. He won’t do his work.

Suddenly, he’s standing on his chair yelling. Or maybe he’s walking out the classroom door or picking a fight with another student.

What should schools do with the kids who aren’t ready or willing to learn?

Paul Wandra knows.

He says he was running headlong into ruin three years ago when he walked into Avon Lake High School with a knife.

Now the 19 year old is ready to graduate and head to college.

“I had a lot of problems going on in my life. I was unruly. I was up and down an emotional rollercoaster,” Wandra said last week, talking about how scared he was when police charged him with carrying a concealed weapon.

Officers gave him a choice: Go to jail, or go to Education Alternatives — an Elyria school that doubles as a counseling and treatment center for children whose emotions are out of control.

Psychological, feel-good hooey, some people might say.

But to Wandra, the school was a place where he learned to cope with stress, and found ways to get his anger under control and deal with depression.

It was also a place where teachers forced him to catch up in his most-dreaded subject — math.

“Now I know exactly what I’m doing with my life and where I’m going,” he said.

Wandra’s on track to get his diploma from Elyria High School in May. Then he wants to attend Kent State University through Lorain County Community College
to get a degree in library science.

The school for ‘bad kids?’

What turned Paul around?

He said it was a building with a nasty reputation for being the place “where the bad kids go to school.”

Gerald Swartz, executive director of Education Alternatives, said he’s wrestled with that misconception for years.

“These aren’t bad kids. They just have some very intense and specialized emotional needs,” he said.

Still, he acknowledges that the school doesn’t look good on paper to outsiders.

The school has 51 students, and since the beginning of the school year in August, Elyria police have been called to the Lake Avenue school for 38 incidents, including nine assaults — many involving injuries to teachers and other staff.

By comparison, two other schools in Lorain County that focus on educating difficult students, Willow Creek Positive Education Program in Eaton Township and Lorain County Academy in Oberlin, each have had to call for police once this school year.

Both cases involved students assaulting teachers, administrators said.

At Education Alternatives, one attack by a 13-year-old boy on Feb. 13 was so severe that two people were taken to the hospital, and the boy later told police he wished he had a gun so he could go back.

In October, a 17-year-old boy barricaded himself in an office, and a few days later, a 13-year-old boy tried to jump out a second-floor window, police reports show.

Later that month, a 17-year-old boy was cited with inducing panic and disorderly conduct after police said he threatened to blow up the school by exploding two C batteries.

Other Elyria police reports talk about students who made sexual remarks to teachers, were caught with drugs and made threats.

So what’s behind all the trouble?

Education Alternatives Principal Noeleen Rothacker said many times, her students just make bad decisions. But other times they are trying to handle very real psychological and emotional specters, she said.

It’s no surprise the police are called time and again to schools for troubled students, said Dawn McCready, who runs the special education program at the Elyria Schools — one of about a dozen districts that send students to Education Alternatives after all other attempts to teach them in a normal classroom have failed.

“Some students have behavior that’s so erratic that it disrupts everyone around them,” McCready said. “It comes to a point where sometimes we have students who are acting out either physically or verbally with frequency and intensity that is so great we can no longer teach them.”

Reprimands, detention, pulling children out of class — even if none of those discipline options works, the law still requires the Elyria Schools to educate those poorly behaved students, McCready said.

That’s where Education Alternatives and a couple of other special schools in the county come in, she said.

Emotional disabilities

Some people still think the term “emotional disability” is pseudo-science, said Ken Siemen, who runs Willow Creek.

But emotional problems are very real, he said. Many of the 80 students in his building suffer from autism, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, pre-schizophrenia, conduct disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and attention deficit disorder, Siemen said.

“Most kids who suffer from these disabilities really do suffer. They don’t develop along with everyone else. They can’t build relationships. They feel like they’re being held back,” he said.

Siemen said psychologists are uncovering more biological roots for the conditions all the time — everything from chemical imbalances to nutritional deficiency.

But whatever the reason, there are many children who haven’t found ways to cope with their emotions the way most people have, he said.

“In the old days, they’d say there was something wrong with the child,” Siemen said. “We thought everything would be OK if we could take them out of their environment, ‘fix’ them and put them back. That doesn’t work.”

Willow Creek typically enrolls students with only the most severe emotional handicaps, Siemen said. Most students who enter his school are used to failure and are prepared to keep on failing, he said.

Both Siemen and Swartz share a common goal. They want to get students back on firm enough footing to return to normal school classes, they said.

“Until they regain emotional control, they’re not ready to learn,” Swartz said.

One big problem he runs into is that many older people don’t understand why there seem to suddenly be so many children with special needs.

“They say those kinds of kids weren’t in their high schools when they went there,” he said. “That’s because back then, those kids were just expelled or had to drop out.”

Now, federal laws require schools to do a better job of taking care of at-risk students. They can’t just turn their backs on them, Swartz said.

Other troubles

Not all kids who act out or get in trouble have emotional issues. Just ask Bill Hamilton, program coordinator for the Lorain County Academy.

“We don’t have any ‘dangerous’ kids here, but we do have some who have had trouble with the law and have been through the court system,” Hamilton said.

“We’re looking at the types of kids who could be successful. They need parental support and an attitude change.”

The Lorain County Academy has 42 students right now in grades six through nine. But unlike Education Alternatives and Willow Creek — which serve students in all grades — Hamilton said his students are rarely with him for more than a couple of semesters.

Instead, the school accepts students who’ve had mild run-ins with police and helps them turn bad decisions into good ones, he said.

Hamilton said when mood swings, unruly friends, drugs and alcohol disappear, grades improve dramatically and his students can head back to their regular schools.

“Our expectation is for them to start owning more of their behavior and their academic performance,” he said.

A lot of that process involves convincing the teens they can be successful and then talking them into trying to achieve, Hamilton said.

How they work

All three schools are non-profit organizations and are answerable to the school districts they serve — not the state, Ohio Department of Education spokesman Scott Blake said.

They aren’t charter schools or technically even schools at all — they’re really treatment facilities, he said.

McCready said students who go to outside facilities like Education Alternatives still have to do the same level of course work and show they understand the material. Grades for nontraditional students have to be reported to the federal government, she said.

School districts foot the cost of students attending the three schools, and that’s where they start to differ wildly.

Lorain County Academy costs about $6,000 per student per year, Hamilton said, and Siemen said it costs about $190 per day — that’s $35,910 per year — for a single student to attend Willow Creek (although that’s not all being paid by the student’s home school district — the county Board of Mental Health covers some of it). Swartz wouldn’t say exactly what tuition is at Education Alternatives, but he was quick to say it’s much less than Willow Creek.

All three put stock in small teacher-to-student ratios, with two or three staffers in the room with six to 12 students at a time, and they all try to give children a more hands-on approach to learning that will let them put their energy to use.

“These aren’t pencil and paper learners, most of them,” Rothacker said. “They need to be up and moving around, learning with their hands and experiencing everything.”

The two schools that take students with emotional disabilities also swear by different psychological approaches. Swartz said his school uses “attachment theory,” which says the ability to control emotions and develop healthy relationships is embedded in the right lobe of the brain. Counseling at Education

Alternatives aims to help kids conquer their insecure behaviors and replace them with positive ones, he said.

Frank Fecser, CEO of Positive Education Program, which owns Willow Creek, said his schools follow the “re-education” philosophy. Instead of trying to treat emotional disorders as illnesses, teachers at PEP schools try to find ways to balance their students’ lifestyles to help them manage anger and outbursts.

Both schools say involving the families of each student is one of the most important parts of their program.

Fecser said it’s rare for one of his students ever to be fully rehabilitated, and Siemen said about 60 percent of Willow Creek students will move on from the school successfully. Swartz says his school has had more success — about a 99 percent graduation rate.

Contact Jason Hawk at 329-7148 or jhawk@chroniclet.com.

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