John Muir Charter works with the California Conservation Corps to help wayward students
The program offers students a last chance to defy the odds and succeed.
FRENCH GULCH, CALIF. — Alex Gowan leaned against the side of the White Rhino. The bleached workhorse of a bus had strained up a near-vertical fire road to carry him and his fellow members of the California Conservation Corps to this wide, bulldozed bluff in the smoke-shrouded mountains west of Redding.
Gowan was a high school dropout whose quest to finally get a diploma had led him here, to the edge of the Motion Fire, or what remained of it after weeks of firefighting. The same was true for most of the 18 other corps members with him, a weary, slap-happy bunch who had been pulling 16- and even 24-hour shifts working backup behind firefighters from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the U.S. Forest Service.
In addition to being members of the Cs, as they call the Conservation Corps, many of these young people were students or recent graduates of one of the most unusual schools in California: John Muir Charter, a program that offered a last chance to defy the odds and succeed.
"I got in trouble back in my wilder, younger days" said Gowan, 19, a lanky, laconic guy in dusty green pants. "I just never really liked the whole school situation." He ticked off the schools in the Redding area that he had attended and left: Foothill, New Tech, Foothill again, Pioneer, North State Adult Education, "and then I sort of dropped off the map."
Lete Sanchez, also 19, strolled by. Her grin threw dimples onto cheeks caked with dust and grime. Funny and self-assured, with a fondness for Led Zeppelin and chain saws, Sanchez had bounced around, too, until she wound up in "one of those continuation schools -- you know, [where] you can do what you want, they just give you a packet and send you in a corner."
"It was pretty lame," she said. So she quit.
Valuable piece of paper
What brought both of them back was the Conservation Corps and Muir -- and the maturity to see that they were going nowhere without a high school diploma.
"Turns out," Gowan said, "that piece of paper will get you places."
John Muir was chartered in 1998, primarily to provide education to participants in the Conservation Corps. The corps had been established more than 20 years earlier by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to turn around wayward youth through projects that would benefit the state's environment. About half its members are high school dropouts.
