By Catherine M. Welch
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/whqr/local-whqr-678158.mp3
Wilmington, NC – hen you first meet Lakeside principal Jerry Oates two things immediately jump out: he's impeccably dressed and he truly loves being a high school principal.
I enjoyed my principal that I had in high school
That would have been Duplin Senior High School Principal Larry Cooper, a man Oates has worked hard to emulate.
He was easy to talk to, the way I noticed him talk to teachers, talk to kids, and he had a true open door policy whatever he was doing, if his door was open come in and talk he'd stop and do it.
And the door to the principal's office at Lakeside has been open during Oates' four years here waiting for a student to sit and visit.
The first thing I tell them is I'm just a good ole country boy that loves helping kids anyway I can, so don't let the title of principal scare you or have any preconceived notions about that title, it's Jerry and whoever that kid is, I talk to them just like I'd talk to my own kids
Another thing you notice about Oates is that he carries a lot of keys. He needs them to get from one end of Lakeside to another.
From outside, the main school building looks like a typical high school from the mid-20th century - that long, brick rectangle with the main entrance in the middle. But inside, that building designed for an easy flow of kids is segmented to block movement and isolate the different groups of troubled students.
And it leaves the school eerily quiet.
For instance, middle school students who have been kicked out of school sit inside first floor classrooms sandwiched between locked doors.
Because we want to keep these kids from mixing with our high school kids.
These are the kids who have been kicked out of middle school. They're sent to Lakeside for a minimum of 45 days. The classes are small, between five and 15 students. And rarely does a staff member take their eyes off these suspended middle school students.
So when these kids go to lunch, there's a teacher before them, a teacher behind them and they're in a line. They're escorted to lunch, they're escorted back, they're escorted to a bathroom, because some kids have a problem with running away, they skip, they're everywhere, they get into things so typically these doors are closed, as you can see this is for middle school only. They enter from that door, my freshmen come from the front door every morning and I check their ID and they go upstairs, but these kids they stay in this hall.
Oates says the emphasis on behavioral counseling is why these kids typically leave Lakeside better behaved than when they arrived.
He says since he's been here only a couple of kids have made the return trip back to Lakeside.
But there are kids who are so unruly that they end up getting kicked out of Lakeside. Those kids end up at the Juvenile Day Treatment Center, whose teaching also falls under Oates' repsonsibility.
If we have a kid that was involved in a fight and was sent here, we know we need to do something with peer mediation and anger management to make sure that no longer happens. Now if it becomes a situation where we cannot do that effectively, then we need to turn to Day Treatment. We are equipped to do the academic side, Day Treatment is better equipped to do the therapeutic side.
Rarely, though, does Oates see violence inside his school. His biggest problem is just getting them inside.
Be it, students don't want to come to school. Be it situations at home where they can't go to school. Be it, they are working and they have to work to supplement family income, it could be a plethora of things
Oates knows all 227 of these kids, and nary a student gets past Principal Oates when he's lingering in the halls ... especially a 9th grader flashing a school ID the size of a postage stamp.
Lakeside not only works with suspended middle school students, but it also catches seniors trying to drop out of school.
New Hanover County School's drop out rate is at 6%. But before a drop out becomes a statistic, there's a stop at Lakeside's so called Third Floor Building.
When a student decides to drop out, it has to be a formal dropping out. They don't withdraw from their home high school, they come here to withdraw with my home counselor. I pounce them, my counselor pounces them and we say we have a program let's talk for a minute.
Oates says 32 students who would otherwise leave school without a high school diploma will graduate from Lakeside this year. And the difference is a classroom packed with students staring at computers and teachers drifting from student to student as they quietly work.
They only work on what is needed for graduation and then they leave. We have some students who come in from 8:30 and then leave at 10 o'clock we hve some that comes in 12:30 to 3:30, it's all day. This lab is open from 8:30 to 6 o'clock.
There are no sports teams at Lakeside, but students can participate in their home school's programs.
There is a weight room and a full-service health clinic that does everything a family practice takes care of. Oates says the kids need the medical care and it helps keep down the absenteeism.
Oates says there are kids who've been through Lakeside that never recovered and some of those heartbreakers have stayed with him through the years.
The reward though is watching the ones who do move onward and upward. The ones who flag him down in the store or come back to tell him he was right, the world is a complicated place and aren't they glad they stuck it out in school.
You know, you see a kid when they're 14, 15-years-old and they see know way out, their parents see no way out, but for whatever happened, they turned it around and you had a part in turning that kid around.
And sometimes the difference, Oates says, is for these kids to have an adult, even if it's just a principal with an open door, who takes the time to talk them.
Click here to visit Lakeside's homepage.