La Familia

Sylvia Rodriguez hates Alta Vista High School.

She doesn't like the principal. Or the teachers. Or most of her fellow students. She especially hates the former office building that houses the school, with its cracked shingle siding and bent iron grates across windows, its narrow halls, mismatched secondhand desks and craggy concrete floors.

"I want to go to a bigger school," she says, scanning a crowd of teen-agers who are huddled around a dozen folding tables in the lunchroom, eating lasagna from Styrofoam plates. "At a small school like this, too many people know everybody's business."

Sylvia lifts a forkful of green beans halfway to her mouth, eyes it warily and drops the food back to her plate. "But I've never been to a bigger school," she says. "So I don't know."

"I like it up in here," says Amy Moyer, Sylvia's best friend. Amy sits on the other side of the table, working her way through a pile of packaged saltines. Like Sylvia, Amy is a sophomore, sixteen years old. Before Alta Vista, she attended Rosedale Middle School in the Kansas City, Kansas, School District. If she hadn't enrolled in this tiny charter school on the north end of Holly Street, atop the bluff overlooking Kemper Arena, she would have gone to J.C. Harmon High, a KCK public school with an enrollment of more than 1,200 students.

She's glad she didn't. "Here, it's more like a family," she says. "You can't just disappear here. The principal knows everyone."

Amy gestures at Sylvia. "She's the opposite," Amy says. "Yet we're friends."

At this, Sylvia seems to soften. She almost smiles as she casts her eyes again across the lunchroom, a windowless space barely as big as a two-car garage.

"As choices go," Sylvia admits, "this seems to be the best."

If Sylvia's mom hadn't sent her to Alta Vista, she'd be at Bishop Miege, a private Catholic school in Kansas, or, based on her address, Kansas City's Central High. "But I probably would have gotten kicked out of Bishop Miege," she says. "Plus, there's too many white people."

She doubts she would have lasted long at Central, either. "Too many black people," she says.

"You like black people," Amy corrects her.

"I like them," she concedes. "But they don't like me."

Sylvia pauses to stare down at her plate. "I don't know," she says. "I just like being around my own kind of people."

Last year, 22 Latino students graduated from Alta Vista. By the time Sylvia is ready to don a cap and gown two years from now, school officials hope to double that figure. Those are small numbers, until you consider the size of the school: 134 students. Roughly seven out of ten students who enroll in Alta Vista emerge with a diploma. They're often the first ones in their families to earn one. Many then go on to community college -- another first for their families.

This is good news in Kansas City's Latino community, which has struggled for decades with dropout rates hovering well above 50 percent.

In the Kansas City School District, Latinos appear to be disappearing after sixth grade. The district has no figures on the current dropout rates for Latinos in Kansas City. But last school year there were 2,288 Latino children attending district elementary schools -- but just 457 enrolled in middle schools and 451 in high schools. Leaders in the Latino community are mystified -- they don't know whether the students are transferring to other public and private schools or just quitting.

And at a time when Latinos are the fastest-growing minority population in the metro -- Hispanics will soon outnumber whites in the Kansas City School District -- Alta Vista offers a model for success. That also goes for the two dozen black or white students. Classes are smaller here, making it harder for students to hide in a corner and ignore the daily lessons. Students find positive role models in the teachers and administrators, who are almost all Latino. The school offers an array of social-support services to fend off negative forces -- gangs, drugs, unprotected sex -- that wield influence both inside and outside the classrooms.

As in any school, there's discord here. You can see it in the lunchroom, where recent immigrants to Kansas City's Historic Northeast neighborhood huddle at the tables near the walls, quietly chatting in Spanish while Westside Chicanos, second- and third-generation Americans of Mexican descent, hold court at the middle tables as if they own the place

"There are gangs here," Alta Vista Principal Cassandra Cole says candidly. "Anyone who tells you differently needs a dose of reality."