MEET THE BAUMANN SCHOOL BUS DRIVERS
SCHOOLS
052303 Legal fees mount in challenge to school trip
By FRANK NARDOZZI
Melissa Russini has had her problems.
The Mount Kisco student was getting grades of 65, just barely passing, when she was a freshman at Fox Lane High School four years ago. In September, she'll be starting her freshman year at Manhattanville College in Purchase.
What happened in between? ACES. The Academic Community for Educational Success. a kind of alternative high school, in the Bedford Central School District.
And Melissa is no exception. David Albano, a teacher at ACES, which operates out of an old church on Railroad Avenue in Bedford Hills, says that ACES has just as high a proportion of its students going on to college as Fox Lane - all of them, at one time, potential dropouts or what society likes to call, "youths at risk."
There are many things that are radically different about ACES in comparison to a traditional high school. For one thing the rules are written by the ACES Congress, made up of students, teachers and administrators meeting together, once a month. The rules are codified into the ACES handbook.
For another, discipline and behavioral problems are handled by a student court that meets every Friday morning.
Melissa is currently the president of ACES. She was nominated and chosen by the entire ACES community.
In order to serve as ACES president, she had to relinquish her position as chief justice.
"You have to sit in on court sessions for two years and then you have to take a really, really hard test and score 85 or above," Melissa said.
"You're tested on the ACES handbook," Mr. Albano said. "All of the questions come from ACES law. You have to prove that you are an ACES lawyer."
What kinds of problems does the ACES law and the ACES court handle?
"Disruptive behavior. Being insubordinate. We never really have a drug problem at all," Melissa said. "We have cutting classes and attendance problems. Not doing your job.
"You shouldn't do any of these things," said Melissa, but the biggest problems, in her opinion, were lying and drugs.
"We have an honor code like West Point," said Mr. Albano. "You tell the truth when asked. You volunteer the truth if you know that someone has done something wrong.
"If you do something wrong, you will have your day in court. If you're found guilty of lying, you can be asked to leave the program," Mr. Albano said.
All of this is completely different from the way that traditional high schools are run. It can be understood as the ACES strategy for coping with the distrust and rebellion against authority that "at risk" students are known to exhibit.
Melissa was kicked out of ACES once for attendance. She had to re-apply to be let back in. That's one of the key prerequisites of being a student in the ACES program. You have to want to be there and you have to make application to get in.
at home get involved with school," said Melissa. "It's really good to be able to talk about your problems in school because you get a lot of support from teachers and the social workers that come every Tuesday and Thursday. You can talk to them and you can talk with teachers any time that you want," Melissa said.
"It really helps with your relationships outside of school like parents or work or something. It's nice - a very comfortable atmosphere," she said.
Experiential learning
But it is the radically different approach to teaching and learning that has been the subject of some controversy recently.
The ACES educational program is heightened with "experiential learning" techniques that incorporate trips to such far away places as Arizona and New Mexico last year, Italy the year before, and this year's trip to Costa Rica, which was taken from Feb. 27 to March 6.
All of the trips are the culmination of a six-week intensive learning unit which incorporates many inter-disciplinary subjects and research projects.
"ACES students do not learn by conventional methods," stated Mr. Albano in his December request to the school board to take the Costa Rican trip.
"For alternative learners, the teaching method is everything. ACES students have high ability; they can learn what AP students can, but only if it is presented in an appropriate way. The most effective method for them is experiential learning," he said.
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"In addition, they have social issues which must be dealt with before they are ready to learn. Many of them have been developing low self-esteem and self-destructive habits since birth.
"They need the experiential approach as part of their counseling program as well as part of their educational program; traditional school counseling alone cannot work for these children any more than traditional education did," Mr. Albano stated.
"The Costa Rica trip is a part of a series of adventure-based counseling trips developed years ago through the Yale Consultation Center. On each trip, students are removed from their damaging personal environments, taught specific cognitive and emotional skills, and allowed to practice those skills in a new, supportive, challenging environment.
"The seven-day trip is the culmination of this process. We go to a foreign country, where another language is spoken and another culture is fully present so that the students are truly separated from old patterns and can restructure their habits more effectively.
"This experience is essential to their social and academic success. Our experiential counseling program literally keeps some of these children alive and sober, helps most of them to be healthy and happy; and enables all of them to achieve higher social and academic standards," Mr. Albano stated.
None of this is very well known or understood by the general public. But the success of the ACES program is well appreciated by the students and their parents.
"It helps a lot to go away and interact with people of a different country and learn about their culture, rather than sitting in a classroom and reading from a book, which is really not that interesting,"
said Melissa.
"Once you go and experience it, it's like, `Oh, my God!' You learn more than you do from a book.
Prior to her trip to Italy, where she went to Florence, Rome and the Vatican where she and her classmates saw the Pope, Melissa said that they had read Dante's "Inferno."
"We had to paraphrase the book into our own words and write about our own kind of inferno," she said. "We took the book and made it our own, stating it very graphically, so that we could understand it better," she said.
"I loved the ACES program. I think it matured me a lot," Melissa said.
School critics challenge
The foreign excursion portion of the program has come under attack by three well-known school district critics - Joe Giardina of Mount Kisco and Michael Carbone of Bedford Hills with the help of Phil Christe, a Mount Kisco insurance agent.
In February, the critics complained to State Education Commissioner Richard Mills about the cost of the program and the seeming extravagance of the trips, even though much of the money is raised by the students, themselves, in voluntary fund-raisers.
In his petition to the education commissioner, Mr. Giardina objected to the trip, asserting that the state constitution required only that all children be afforded a "sound basic education."
This includes "the basic literacy, calculating and verbal skills necessary" to enable them to function productively in society and to perform such civic duties as voting and serving on a jury, he said.
"Subsidizing foreign travel is not a fundamental right under the state constitution. Trips to Costa Rica are not required to fulfill our constitutional obligations. No educational deprivation is at stake here," he said.
Mr. Giardina likened the district's paying the travel and lodging costs of chaperones to "subsidizing voluntary vacations with public monies" and warned that a dangerous precedent was being set.
"Unlimited, extravagant and voluntary travel of students and teachers, subsidized by the taxpayer, stretches the definition of a field trip to the absurd," he stated
In his objections, Mr. Carbone took a different tack.
He argued that the school board had made the Costa Rica trip "an integral portion of the curriculum" by allowing it to occur during regular school days and recognizing it for academic credit.
He noted that State Education Law entitles children between the ages of 5 and 21 to attend public schools in their school districts without the payment of tuition.
Mr. Carbone maintained that students wishing to benefit from the planned academic instruction associated with the Costa Rica trip would be compelled to pay $1,117 if they wished to go on the trip and be taught by full-time district staff during regular school days. This, he said, was "patently unfair and illegal."
Mr. Carbone also objected to the fund-raisers that have been sponsored by the ACES program to raise money for the trip, with the funds distributed to students on the basis of need. He called these distributions "tuition vouchers," sayingthat they are contrary to law.
Melissa said that these fund-raiser include a tag sale and car wash, a pie sale, a coffee house poetry reading and a special holiday dinner.
"The students and teachers make the pies - apple and pumpkin," Melissa said.
"We have a crazy pie factory for 24 hours. We've got two ovens in the kitchen at ACES, so we can cook eight pies at a time," said. Mr. Albano. "This year was the record. We made almost 200 pies."
There's the apple peeling detail, the pie filling detail and the crust topping detail that goes until about 4 a.m. Then the students get up at 6:30 a.m. to deliver the pies to the schools where the orders had been placed.
The pies are sold for $10 apiece. Much of the baking materials is donated or bought by the students themselves. The students raise about $6,000 from all of their fundraising activities in a year.
"That covers the expenses for students who cannot afford the full cost of the trip," Mr. Albano said. "We work it like a scholarship. Using the honor code, we ask each student what they can afford to pay. Then we divide up the money using a sliding scale. Very often we can give each student very close to the amount that they applied for."
Recently, the finance committee chairman of the Bedford Central school board, Mark Slivka, brought to light that the school district's legal fees are costing more than the district's contribution toward the last trip - the cost of providing chaperones for the eight days the students spent in Costa Rica studying the tropical rainforest, picking coffee beans and learning how to relate to a foreign culture.
The district contributed more than $14,000 toward the cost of chaperones. Legal fees to the district, according to the most recent billings, have now reached $20,000, according to Schools Superintendent Bruce Dennis.
At the Bedford Central Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, Dr. Dennis called the school critics' challenge to the program "a meanspirited attempt to discredit a legitimate educational program."
Mr. Slivka called the legal expense "exorbitant" and suggested that there should be other ways to resolve such disputes through discussion, or even some kind of gauge of public sentiment reached through the local newspapers.
Assistant Superintendent of Schools Mark Betz called the complaints lacking in reason, "not laudable," and simply meant to tie up the school district in an expensive, protracted proceeding.
"The persons behind this should be exposed for what they're doing. It's God awful," Mr. Betz said. "There is no merit or basis."
The school board's president, Dot Fallon, stated that other individuals manage to find ways to express their concerns, other than suing the school district.
"It happens every day," she said.
School Board Trustee Brad Sacks said, "Time and time again, these complaints have been found to be frivolous. The people who bring these complaints should be held accountable."
He recommended that the district go on the offensive and seek money damages, as well as the cost of legal fees. "We've got to hit them in their pocketbooks," he urged.
Dr. Dennis said that he had discussed the matter with the district's legal counsel and had been told that the district had "no recourse" but to proceed with its defense. The case, he was told, had statewide implications and the commissioner's decision would set an important precedent.
"I'm afraid we have no choice," Dr. Dennis told the school board.
There was no indication as to when Commissioner Mills was likely to render a decision.
Junior Caitlin Phelps uses a shammy to dry a freshly-cleaned car last Saturday at the Academic Community for Educational Success (ACES, Fox Lane High School's alternative school), which had its annual tag sale and car wash. Funds raised go toward student activities such as the recent Costa Rica trip.