Learning Curves

"I don't want to come across as cocky, but it takes some brains to pull this off," says Christopher Barbic, the school's founder and director. "It takes more than good intentions and a good heart."

Unlike other charter schools, YES College Prep raises several hundred thousand dollars a year from foundations, corporations and other sources to assist its well-rounded educational program.

Among other things, the money helps to send students on extensive field trips. Last year, tenth graders visited Boston and New York and toured Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and New York University.

Extra funds pay for Saturday cultural enrichment classes, which students are required to attend twice a month. And it pays for extra supplies and food to keep students well-stocked and well-nourished.

YES employs one teacher who spends half of the work day promoting the school and soliciting contributions. The investment has paid off. For example, students now have access to 100 used laptop computers, donated by the Arthur Andersen consulting firm.

About 90 percent of YES College Prep students are Hispanic and almost all of their families are at the poverty level. "We're not taking the superstar magnet school kid," says YES founder Barbic, a tall 29-year-old with a bald head, goatee and J. Crew necktie. "We look for the middle-of-the-road student."

YES students include those who, had the school not nabbed them first, could easily have joined a gang. Even though the drab campus consists only of several nondescript modular buildings scattered across an asphalt parking lot, there is a long waiting list of children whose parents want them to go there.

The school teaches fifth through 11th graders and, based on Texas Academic Assessment Standards test results, is doing a good job of it. Barbic proudly displays the 1998-99 scores that show all 43 tenth graders had passed the math and writing portion and 95 percent had passed reading. Nine students got at least 95 percent of the questions right on the reading test, and 14 did the same in math. Scores are similarly stellar among the sixth through eighth graders.

YES students go to school Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., attend the biweekly Saturday classes and one month of summer school. Suspended kids are required to attend classes -- although they must bear the insult of having to wear their shirts inside-out, stand up throughout class and keep silent around their classmates.

"The first couple weeks, parents of new students think I'm a monster," Barbic says.

But parents tend to change their minds as their child is transformed from mediocre to high achiever. YES College Prep is held out by charter school advocates as a model, especially now that the Renaissance era has collapsed. But the qualities behind the success of YES are tough to bottle.

The school began in 1995 as Project YES, a middle school affiliated with the Houston Independent School District. For three years, it operated under HISD's wing and was able to take advantage of numerous administrative benefits of the relationship, such as being able to use the district's contract services for transportation and food.

Although the relationship had its rocky moments, Barbic admits that the school's success today is in part because YES administrators were able to cut their teeth for three years while under HISD's security blanket.

It's different today. Barbic points to a large city street map hanging in his office. It's been violated with hundreds of push pins, each one representing the home of a YES student. Forty different ZIP codes have pins in them. Barbic had to study that map for hours on end in order to chart the school's busing system. Then he had to drive the six routes himself to make sure his plan worked.

"It was the logic puzzle from hell," he says.

Barbic would rather be teaching students. At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he majored in English and pre-law. After graduating, he hooked up with Teach For America, an AmeriCorps program that allows young people to earn teacher certification in exchange for a two-year commitment to teach in a poor neighborhood. Barbic landed at Rusk Elementary in Houston's east end. He took over a class of sixth graders who had all flunked the TAAS. He inspired them to do better only to find out after they graduated that some had joined gangs. That's when he and other dejected Rusk faculty members got together to form Project YES.

Of the 16 teachers at YES College Prep, ten are Teach for America graduates.

"Everybody here works ridiculous hours," Barbic says while playing host on a campus tour. "I got home last night at 9:30 and the summer school classes end at 1 [p.m.]. I have no life. I mean I just got married, but other than that I have no life. This is my life."

It takes commitment. It takes people who care.