For these lottery winners, payoff is education
Apple Valley academy's academics are so revered that waiting lists and lotteries determine its students
By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI / The Press-Enterprise
Used with permission from the Press-Enterprise
APPLE VALLEY - Nestled between High Desert scrub brush, rock-strewn hills and the Mojave River, the Academy for Academic Excellence is one of the most unusual and popular charter schools in the Inland area.
Fourth-graders are bused from as far away as Perris to pan for gold-painted rocks in a replica gold-rush town. Elementary school kids use an aircraft simulator. High school film students make their own horror movies and music videos.
Just across the hall in a mission control-style classroom, middle-school-age youngsters use computers to manipulate a 34-meter radio telescope that helped NASA map landing sites on Mars.
Class sizes are small on average and the counseling staff has half the load of most high schools.
All this makes for a K-12 school that parents are eager to get their kids into. It has an enrollment of 900 students, with only about 120 openings each year.
The school has a waiting list of 2,500 names. The openings are filled by lottery.
Jennifer Eisenbrey, 29, of Apple Valley, has waited two years for her son, Wyatt, now 3, to make it to the top of the list for kindergarten. Her second son, Kaivan, is 4 months old. She wasn't taking any chances with him. Kaivan has been on the waiting list since six months before he was born.
"I've heard of other parents doing it," Eisenbrey said. "I wasn't sure that it could be done. He doesn't even have a Social Security number." She could. And did.
It's a little easier to get in at the secondary-school level, says Principal Gordon Soholt. "At the seventh-grade level we expand our population by 60 students."
Third-graders and beyond attend classes at a 150-acre campus along the riverbank just off the Happy Trails Highway. About 120 pupils, kindergarten through second grade, attend classes in a 50,000-square-foot building at the Thunderbird campus three miles away.
'It Kept Evolving'
The public school, chartered by the state as part of the Apple Valley Unified School District, grew out of an after-school program begun 20 years ago by Rick Piercy, 52, a kindergarten teacher at the time at Mojave Mesa, a public elementary school.
"I had no idea what I was getting into," he said. "Instead of teaching remedial reading in the afternoon, the principal agreed to let me teach the Young Astronauts program."
He took 30 students at a time.
"I asked the teachers not to send me their gifted students," Piercy said. "They sent me their biggest disciplinary-problem students."
He struck a deal with the students: finish their assignments and behave in class and he would help them build space suits, calculate the size of dinosaurs and build rockets.
"In December 1985, I took an old telescope to look at Halley's comet," he said. "I invited some of my students out."
They came -- along with 200 parents -- and they stayed until 2 in the morning.
"I went to the principal," Piercy recalled in a straightforward, dead-pan tone, "and I said, ''Astronomy is something the kids are really interested in.'"
Five years of fund-raising later, Piercy opened the Apple Valley Science and Technology Center -- built around an observatory and its optical telescope. The center eventually became the Lewis Center for Educational Research, named for Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, a champion of its programs.
"It kept evolving," Piercy said.
In 1997, Virgil Barnes, then assistant superintendent, now superintendent of the Apple Valley Unified School District, suggested starting a charter school to create a self-funding mechanism for the center.
When the Academy for Academic Excellence opened on July 11 that year, its 200 students were enrolled in home-schooling independent-study programs.
"We still held classes on campus, but students picked and chose what classes they would take," Soholt said.
"One thing we did, in response to legislation, was to convert the school three years ago to an 85 percent full-time program," he said. "The great majority of our students now take all of their courses on campus. That worked."
While the school doesn't have a football team, it has almost everything else -- including a prom -- that is offered at other Apple Valley district high schools. Its students also can enroll in classes at a local community college.
One of the Best
The academy scored a 10 in 2004 among similar schools on the Academic Performance Index, and a 9 among all high schools in the state, according to the California Department of Education.
"A 10 is the highest a school can possibly rank," said Keith Edmonds, an education specialist in the state Department of Education's charter schools division.
"You have to conclude that this school, which has a very good reputation in our office, by the way," he said by phone, "is really one of the highest-performing charter schools in the state."
The school provides a place both for high-achieving students and for youngsters who weren't successful in other settings, Soholt said.
Taking classes on campus offers more opportunities than learning at home, Soholt said. It allows students to help out with the habitats established on the school grounds to rehabilitate endangered desert tortoises, and to study under filmmaker Steven Orsinelli, who worked on two "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies.
Students can help monitor the school's seismograph, which measures earthquakes. Or they can take part in Project Dig: a class taught by elementary science coordinator Meg Deppe in which third- and fourth-graders create their own civilization, including a language.
The key is basic math, says Soholt.
Fewer Students per Teacher
"At a typical high school, a teacher has 40 students in a class and they see 210 students on a daily basis," he said. "Here, our teachers have a class size of 24 and they see 100 students on a daily basis. It's easier."
The school's $8 million annual budget gets $5.7 million from the state through the Apple Valley school district and the rest from private donations. It spends as much as $7,200 per student annually, school spokeswoman Cheryl Thompson said, or about $2,000 more than the state allocates to schools based on average daily attendance.
The academy also partners with such public agencies as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which uses the students and their radio telescope to conduct research, and the Mojave Water Agency, for which students collect data on the management of surface water and groundwater.
It is those partnerships that sets the academy apart, said Edmonds of the state Department of Education.
"They've got a very solid academic program in all respects," he said. "The science component is really exemplary."
"It's the classes they offer," said Theresa Butcher, 57, of Apple Valley, who has three grandchildren enrolled at the school. "Every year they keep adding new and interesting classes. And it's the staff. And I believe it's the music program. It's the performing arts program. No, it's the science."
'Tremendous Advantage'
Molly Estes, 17, a senior from Victorville, enrolled at the school three years ago in hopes of getting into a home-schooling program, but she was too late.
"I got in full time, and I'm really glad I did," she said. "It has been a tremendous advantage."
She is finishing a two-year science project in which she is raising Mohave tui chub, the only fish native to the Mojave River, in a small marsh on the campus. She plans to release into the river four-inch-long fishes so endangered that the only known population lives in a small pond at a preserve in Zzyzx near Baker.
She has developed her own Web page.
"Doing science fascinates me," she said. "The opportunity I have had is awesome."
But there are drawbacks, says 17-year-old senior Erin O'Connor, who had hoped to play football. The school has no football team.
"I'm on the baseball team, but we don't have a field," he said. "We have to go way off campus to practice."
'Nerds' Accepted
Heather Merrill, 16, of Apple Valley, is a junior completing her first year at the academy. Her attendance at the school was her mom's idea.
"She liked the title, Academy for Academic Excellence. The name seems to perk up good thoughts when you go on a job interview," Heather said.
She was a cheerleader at her last school, Bonita High in La Verne. Not here.
"A lot of people misconstrue the idea of a cheerleader," she said. "A lot of the girls here who are more readily into studying really don't find cheering and acting goofy, in their perception, an acceptable quality. At this school, probably being a cheerleader is a little more intimidating because the national ideal sort of insinuates that you are not very bright."
She said her Apple Valley schoolmates are generally accepting.
"We don't really have a lot of cliques," Heather said. "At a lot of schools you don't see the mixing of the nerds and the populars. Here you do."
And if the school gets a reputation for producing nerds?
"What's the definition of a nerd?" asks Lisa Lauron, 42, of Apple Valley, who has one child enrolled there and two on the waiting list. "If the definition of being a nerd is focusing on academics, yeah, this is a nerdy school. If a nerd is being a geek, who rules the world now? A bunch of geeks."