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CEP, which a few years ago set aside 110 slots for shorter sentences, says that it is up to the individual school district to determine the length of stay. Standard placements, it says, range from 30 to 180 days, with 102 being the average.

One teacher described his year at CEP in nothing but dismal terms. "All we were doing as teachers was being a police officer without badges, trying to stop fights and trying to stop food fights and riots all day."

He said more than half of the kids there did want to get rehabilitated, get straight and return to their home school. But he doesn't feel CEP did well by those kids because, he said, "they were getting absolutely zero education."

Another teacher, the one who stayed with CEP for so long, saw changes and feels CEP did some good, especially with students caught up in gang violence at their home schools who felt CEP was safer.

Many of the students sent to CEP, though, he said, just spent time learning more bad behaviors. If classes had been held to eight to ten kids, he said, he thinks the students could have been helped more. But in classes of 30 kids, there were just too many behavior problems for teachers to be effective, he said.

Ultimately, his heart was broken when the school seemed to step back from some of the gains it had made, when, he says, attendance figures once again became far more important than anything else.

CEP has its roster of stars, of kids who made it. HISD has its statistics and points to CEP as a more than acceptable solution.

Robert Kimball's numbers don't match all this self-congratulation. He went looking for kids and couldn't find them in HISD's own databanks. He matched anecdotal stories with stats with common sense and came up with a much more disturbing outcome than the one claimed by either the public school system or the private company that takes its most troubled kids.

In Anthony's case, his attorney says he went through a special-ed program at his middle school this summer that allowed him to move on to Sam Houston High School. In late September, just shy of two months into the school year, he was still enrolled there, according to HISD records.

There are victories even if they are of the moment. It will be interesting to see who gets the credit in Anthony's case.

margaret.downing@houstonpress.com Anthony was sentenced to alternative school at Community Education Partners, and there was nothing his mother or his lawyer could do about it. He had violated the student code of conduct regarding "dress code, defiance." Mom and the lawyer weren't disputing that Anthony had not behaved well, but they were hoping allowances would be made for the fact that Anthony probably should be in special education. And as offenses go, his profanity, belligerence and sleeping in class weren't on the level of weapons, drugs or serious bodily injury.

His actions, they said, were a result of his disability, a combination of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and depression.

That argument went absolutely nowhere in a series of meetings with Burbank Middle School officials. School officials pointed out that Anthony had never been certified as a special ed student. The insinuation was clear that this was probably just a desperate measure to avoid his rightful punishment. When the lawyer asked for special ed testing before Anthony was moved to CEP, this was rejected. His mother, Connie Ruiz, formally requested special-ed testing in May 2005, but that didn't happen.

HISD was adamant. Anthony would have to go to one of the alternative schools founded and operated by Nashville-based Community Education Partners. His sentence was 180 days, the equivalent of an entire school year. Since 1997, HISD has been contracting out its problems to CEP and saying it has everyone's best interests at heart.

There were the usual grief stages of denial. The mother didn't want him in CEP, but home schooling would be a tough job, considering that Anthony had failed fourth and eighth grades and was looking to fail again.

So he went off to CEP, where he was scanned each day to get in, plunked in front of a computer and told to get with it. His attorney, Barbara Ashley, filed appeal after appeal, but nothing moved forward much.