DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - Students walked across the stage Friday at Scavo alternative school in Des Moines. By the time they reached the other side, they were high school graduates.
It’s been a long journey for many in the class of 2020 - the last class that will earn Scavo diplomas.
Next year, the school will transition as the district devotes greater attention to new programs to reach students who do not fit into the traditional high school environment.
Some graduates, like Eloy Vasquez, told the Des Moines Register they wouldn’t have made it without the support that Scavo offered.
He transferred from East High School during his freshman year after getting in trouble with other students. Now 20 years old, he calls himself a “super, super senior.”
Vasquez suffers from ADHD, which makes it hard for him to concentrate in large classes, and he credits Scavo’s teachers and the school’s one-on-one attention for keeping him on track to earn his diploma.
“I didn’t always view Scavo as this great place, but as I’ve matured and grown, I realized a whole bunch about what teachers have been doing and how they’ve been pushing me,” he said.
With a daughter on the way, he recently launched his own mobile auto detailing business and plans to take classes to earn his real estate licenses and begin investing in properties.
“I just know that I still have a lot of things to accomplish,” he said.
Scavo senior Brandon Holkan said the school’s teachers “try to help you even when you don’t want to help yourself.”
He’s headed to DMACC in the fall and plans to transfer to Iowa State, where he wants to study to become a family counselor.
Classmate Teri Riccelli said Scavo’s learn-at-your-own pace approach helped her make up the credits she was lacking after transferring from Lincoln High School.
“When I first started going to Scavo I didn’t think I could graduate because of how far behind I was,” she said. “The teachers are just really supportive they just want to see us do good.”
Going full time each day her senior year, Riccelli, 17, was able to make up two years’ worth of classes so she could graduate on time. She recently completed training to become a certified nursing assistant.
“If I didn’t go to Scavo I don’t think that I would have ended up graduating,” she said.
Scavo traces its roots to the 1960s when North High School teachers Chuck Greenwood and Vincent C. Scavo opened the district’s first alternative program following a wave of racial incidents in the schools.
It had a voluntary attendance program and was initially geared toward dropouts and students who were expelled from other schools.
Vincent J. Scavo remembers visiting the school with his father as a young boy.
“It was really a strange place,” he said. “I’d never been in a school where there were ashtrays and kids freely moving about and talking to teachers.
“It wasn’t the traditional sense of what we would think about as high school.”
But it worked. Des Moines opened a second alternative school on the south side in 1972 before merging the programs into its own comprehensive high school. It was renamed Scavo for its former principal in 1995.
Over the years, Scavo had stops at the Kurtz building on the south side and the Moore Elementary building on the west side, before landing in its current home on the fourth floor of downtown’s Central Campus building in 2015.
Vincent J. Scavo credits the school’s success over the years with its ability to provide students a place to belong that they could not find elsewhere.
“It gave that sense of community and that’s something that people in the alternative education system know - belonging is important to everybody,” he said.
Scavo’s base has broadened over the years to include students who struggle in a traditional school environment for a variety of reasons, including those with children and those working to support their families, Principal Richard Blonigan said.
“The thing they have in common is they are over age and under credited,” he said.
But the stigma of being an alternative school has remained a challenge.
“I’ve had parents that have brought their children in and the parent might have been totally against the student coming here, but as soon as we sat down and went through the process of the needs for that student and what we can offer, they walk out of here almost skipping,” he said.
n February, the school board voted to remove Scavo’s designation as a high school and transition it into a program.
District officials compared it to the way Central Campus operates. Students who attended Central Campus - even those who attend school there all day - remain tethered to their home high school.
A student who lives within the Hoover High School boundaries, but attends Central Campus full time, is still considered a Hoover student.
The same will be true of the reinvented Scavo alternative program.
But it will mean fewer students. There were 282 students enrolled at Scavo this school year. Blonigan estimates that will drop to 80 to 100 students next year.
The district is also working to figure out where the new Scavo will be located, he said, but it could end up back at Central Campus.
Meanwhile, Blonigan and his staff are working on a new approach that will take teachers out into the community to work with students next fall.
“We know there are reasons why kids don’t come to school and we’re going to find opportunities to go out and meet them in places where they feel comfortable,” Blonigan said.
Many students who otherwise would have found their way to Scavo will be steered into other programs within the district.
Des Moines has launched Flex Academy programs in each of its five comprehensive high schools with the goal of helping students recover missed credits and graduate on time.
Virtual Campus - once a collection of generic off-the-shelf courses - has been overhauled to align with the curriculum taught in Des Moines classrooms.
And Options Academy, the district’s newest alternative program, which opened this fall, is designed to help students returning to school and those behind in credits earn their diplomas through a combination of classwork and high school equivalency exams.
Many Scavo staff members are transferring to those programs as well.
Blonigan, who will oversee the district’s alternative programs, said it’s an opportunity to take the lessons learned at Scavo and spread them out districtwide.
“What we’re doing is creating a menu of options to meet the needs of those students,” he said. “Flex Labs are perfect examples of something that started with things we were doing and it blossomed into something every school can do.”
Even though Scavo is changing, the district is committed to meeting the needs of students who do not thrive in a traditional classroom setting - just in a different way.
That’s OK with Vincent J. Scavo.
“We’re less concerned about the name on the building and more concerned about the lives it impacts,” he said.
“The need will always be there for folks who have obstacles to learning. The district will respond.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.