Ninth-grader Anabel Gonzalez was in danger of dropping out of school. And she didn't care.
Anabel preferred wandering Roosevelt High School with her friends to sitting in a classroom. She detested the Eastside school's run-down facilities and crowded classrooms, and she feared the girls she fought in the halls. Administrators wrote her up repeatedly and seized her skateboard.
Today, the 15-year-old freshman sometimes can't bring herself to leave school. She sits with about a dozen other students in a shiny new classroom. At her desk, she works on a sleek Macintosh computer. She eagerly attends math, music and kickboxing classes. Some days, her father doesn't pick her up until 8 p.m., and that's fine with her.
Anabel's outlook, and the attitudes of 25 other students like her, has been changed -- at least for now -- by Boyle Heights Technology Academy, an alternative high school a few minutes from downtown Los Angeles.
The school has small classes in a new $10.9-million building with resources that would be the envy of some college prep academies. In partnership with the Boyle Heights Technology Youth Center, it serves students who are at risk of dropping out, who are truants or failing classes or have had run-ins with the law.
These are the teens "no one really wants to deal with," said Jimmy Valenzuela, director of the youth center, which houses the school. "People label them high risk, at risk, bad kids, gang kids, probation kids.
"But we don't. We look at them as youth."
The county-run school has a link to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is embroiled in a legal battle over his plans to take some control of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Valenzuela, an acquaintance of the mayor, and school officials credit Villaraigosa with securing $7 million for the youth center when he was a member of the L.A. City Council and hundreds of thousands of dollars more when he became mayor.
And Villaraigosa is scheduled to headline an event Thursday night at the center that officials have likened to the school's and center's coming-out party. The band Ozomatli and members of the Black Eyed Peas also plan to attend.
Villaraigosa, teachers and administrators view the school as a model for others. They hail the Boyle Heights campus as an unprecedented confluence of education, technology and an opportunity for troubled teens.
The mayor "sees this as a school of best practices," said Ramon C. Cortines, Villaraigosa's top education advisor.
