La Familia

Alta Vista became a charter school in 1998, allowing kids from public schools to transfer there and have their education paid for by the state. The school's population has ballooned to nearly 150 kids, 80 percent of them Latino.

And along with the state money has come a new level of accountability, in the form of achievement tests. On these, Alta Vista students have not fared well, and the statistics threaten the school's future.

It's just after 8 on a mid-December morning when Sylvia and Amy walk into Ed Mendez's classroom, a narrow basement space with concrete floors and inexpensive dry-erase boards screwed into the walls -- Mendez bought the boards with his own money at Home Depot. He has also adorned the room with motivational posters, one of which reads "You can't choose your circumstances, but you can choose to overcome them."

The tardy bell rings. "All right," Mendez says, "we're going to play a game." He divides the class into teams of two and passes out dry-erase markers. The rules are simple. He asks questions, and the first team to jump up and write the correct answer on the board gets a point. The team with the most points wins.

Twelve kids sit on the edge of their seats, clutching markers. Mendez stands at the front of the class, idly massaging his goatee. "What is the first step in creating a law?" he asks.

Amy jumps up and scribbles "Introduce Idea" on the board.

"Introduce idea?" Mendez asks.

"Yeah, you know, like the mayor," she says, dropping into a slight curtsy. "Or a neighborhood person."

"OK," he says, walking over to the board to mark a point for Amy's team. "A law starts as an idea. Then it becomes a bill. And then the City Council votes it into law."

He tosses out another question. Amy leaps up and scores a second point. A minute later, she's got three points and a strong lead. She does a dance as she returns to her seat.

Sylvia rolls her eyes. "Teacher's pet," she scoffs.

Jealousy aside, Sylvia is enthralled by the game, as are the other kids in the class. Yet there's nothing special about it. Mendez has them play a game like this whenever he wants them to review for a test that is looming on the horizon. Caught up in the adrenaline of a game, they don't seem to notice that they're studying for a test. It beats boring old worksheets, Mendez says. Competition gets his students into what he calls the "anticipatory set," where they're hanging on every word the teacher says. "I try to get them more motivated," he says.

Mendez has dedicated his life to motivating kids. Four years ago, he gave up a job as a project manager with GE Capital, taking a pay cut of almost 50 percent to become a teacher. He was part of the first wave of new hires when Alta Vista became a charter school in fall 1998. To accommodate the influx of new students that year, Alta Vista held its freshman classes in the basement of Sacred Heart gym at 26th and Belleview, across the neighborhood from the Holly hillside. Portable partitions divided the basement into makeshift classrooms. On Fridays, the teachers took down the walls to make room for weekend activities; on Mondays, they arrived early to put up the partitions again. Midsemester, they moved one block up Belleview to the basement of the Plaza del Niños day care, where they once again had to shuffle the walls every week. By spring semester, they were finally able to move into the current site on Holly.

Mendez has never regretted his decision to leave the corporate world. He sees it as an opportunity to serve as a positive role model for kids like the ones with whom he grew up. With his brown skin, boyish face and neatly trimmed, combed-back hair, he looks like a lot of the kids at Alta Vista. But unlike the students, who tend to wear their shirts untucked and their baggy khakis cinched below their hips, Mendez sports freshly creased slacks and clean guayaberras, the ornately stitched short-sleeved shirts favored by men in Central America.

He also embodies a different future than his students have imagined for themselves. Mendez rose out of the Argentine neighborhood, a predominately Latino enclave just south of the Kansas River in Kansas City, Kansas. His father had immigrated to the area from Mexico in the mid-1960s, taking a railroad job. Then as now, few from his neighborhood entered adulthood with high-school diplomas. Though the elder Mendez never graduated from high school, he made financial sacrifices to send his son to the private Bishop Ward High School. Mendez made good on his family's investment, going on to earn a degree in business from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has a stock portfolio and is studying for a master's degree.

Even Sylvia likes him, which is no small accomplishment, considering her disdain for school.