This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 1, 2011 - In recent months, Stephanie Krauss essentially has given birth twice. Son Justice, now 3 months old, was the product of "19 hours of unmedicated labor." Shearwater High School, a charter school in north St. Louis now midway through its first year, took considerably longer.
Krauss takes strong, evident pride in both.
Shearwater, which is housed on the campus of Ranken Tech at 4470 Finney, is designed to help students ages 17-21 resume and complete their education after it has been interrupted because they dropped out, became homeless or ran into any number of life's roadblocks.
Krauss, who overcame her own troubled teen years to go on to earn two master's degrees and become the driving force behind Shearwater, has a twofold mission: To get her students ready for college so they will be ready for a rewarding working life.
To prepare, they have a 9-5 school day, all year round -- internships in the morning and classwork in the afternoon, with basic instruction in reading, math and projects that help connect their academic subjects to the world they'll enter after Shearwater. They're expected to leave after two years or after the semester they reach 21, when the law says their free public education must end.
Students are judged by their LOAs -- levels of acquisition, which are linked to Missouri state standards as well as national education goals. They need 200 LOAs to graduate.
"They graduate based on their performance, not on their seat time, which is what you see in a traditional school," she said.
Each day, students are greeted by a sign asking if they are ready to enter Shearwater -- uniform on, shirt tucked in, pants pulled up, no hat or sunglasses, no earrings for the young men -- and a positive attitude.
When the school year started in August, Krauss said, 90 students had signed up. Not all showed up on the first day, and not all of the rest have stuck around -- some because they enrolled for the wrong reasons, some because they didn't realize how tough the program would be. Two have died. Krauss says 50 students remain.
"We had several students enroll who wanted it for reasons other than what they wanted for themselves," she said. "The court may have wanted them to be here, or where they were living wanted them to be here.
"They said 'Yes, yes, yes" and signed the papers, but when they have left, it has always been amicable. They may say they're not ready yet. This is hard work. It's not just for students who see it as an option that is easier than getting a GED. Some students left not because it was too hard but because they were not willing to give what was needed. They were only giving 20 percent."
Aiming for College
To make sure that students are constantly reminded of Shearwater's focus for them, college pennants adorn many of the walls. Their internships at places like Saint Louis University, Harris-Stowe State University, Children's Hospital and Emerson, the school's biggest contributor, help them remember that they are preparing not only for higher education but for the working world.
"The kids are surrounded by college graduates and exposed to growth industries," Krauss said. "At Saint Louis U. and Harris-Stowe, they have double exposure, and we know that increased exposure to college increases the likelihood that they will go to college."
Testing divided the student body into four groups, according to where their learning placed them -- one at the high school level, one at the middle school level and two more below middle school, where 75 percent of the students were placed. The evaluations were disheartening to some, Krauss said.
"Our students feel very duped when we have that honest conversation and tell them that they are at the sixth-grade level," she explained. "No one has told them that before."
To help improve, classes concentrate on literature that the students can relate to -- books like Elie Wiesel's "Night" or S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders." Math classes make sure students have the number skills they will need. Social work teams help ease them over some of the inevitable rough spots they may experience in school or may have brought to Shearwater with them.
"We've got students who are still a bit rough," Krauss said, "and the others listen to the stories they share. But they are still engaged. They are still trying to connect.
"How effective it is to be able to connect the violence in their neighborhood to the violence in a concentration camp. It's the first step in developing the higher thinking skills they will need to be successful in college."
A Leader and a Victim of Violence
One of the students, 19-year-old Ace Cannon, who lives in the Soulard neighborhood, came to Shearwater after eight years in the Rockwood School District in west St. Louis County, as part of the voluntary desegregation plan. He said he found out about the program from a counselor at Rockwood Summit High School.
In college, Cannon said he hopes to study web design or fashion design. He has an internship at Saint Louis U.
Krauss said that Cannon's presence has helped make him a leader among his peers -- someone who is hard-working and respectful and sets a good example for others.
For his part, Cannon said he likes the position he finds himself in compared with his previous school.
"I get more compliments and respect here," he said. "People here see me as a leader."
Another student who was looked up to by his peers has a sadder story. Maurice Murray Jr. was shot to death Jan. 26, three days after his 21st birthday. Murray had been featured in a television news story about Shearwater, saying that the school helped teach students like him about responsibility.
Krauss said that Murray was the perfect example of the kind of student Shearwater was formed to serve -- someone whose earlier school career had been interrupted, someone who went on to become a parent and did not want to end up in the kind of life that often results when you have no education.
"He wanted to take care of his kids," she said. "He was on fire. Though it's not the outcome we would have wanted for him, he leaves behind a tremendous legacy for his kids."
Even now, Krauss says, his former classmates who are facing tough situations ask themselves what Maurice would do.
"He was not always an easy kid," she said. "But we don't deal with easy kids."
Becoming Shearwaters
Easy is not a common word in the history and philosophy of Shearwater, a name chosen because it represents a long-living, long-distance migratory bird always on the go.
Krauss is listed on the school's website as its president and CEO, but in effect she also serves as the school's academic leader, its chief inspiration and the woman who wants to make sure everything is running like it should. On a recent afternoon, she spotted a student not in class and wanted to make sure he was headed for where he should be; when another student vomited in a hallway outside her office, she made sure someone knew where to find the Lysol needed to help clean things up.
At an age where she is old enough to make Shearwater what she wants it to be, yet young enough that students can see her as a model, she talks easily and openly about how things are going, where they are right and what missteps have been made along the way.
If she had it to do all over again, she said, she would refine Shearwater's recruitment message a bit.
"We were so excited about our model," Krauss said, "we told them everything from the start. Some students chose Shearwater because they heard they could get out in two years instead of four. They didn't realize it was because of their age.
"Others thought it would be easier than a GED program, but we use the GED as an exit exam, so it really is much more difficult than just a GED."
Above all, she said, she wants to make sure that Shearwater is a place where students come voluntarily, a place where they are eager to get the kind of training they will need to go out into the world, often for a second time, and have a better chance at success.
"The young people who come here and are still messing around don't want school, and they act like they have to be here," Krauss said. "There's a big difference between having to be here and wanting to be here.
"The majority feel that they want to be here. If they feel they have to be here, it's a perpetual battle, because the school is so hard. It's a challenging school."
For her and her staff, the challenge is to keep their eyes on the prize they want all their students to earn.
"Our only focus is our mission: getting these kids to college," Krauss said. "We do everything we can to keep them moving along that path."