From truant to early graduate
Teen finds success at alternative H.S.
Last year, if you saw 15-year-old Shana Patrick roaming the halls of Long Beach High School, she was probably making a brief visit for the cafeteria or her ceramics class. The rest of her school day was spent roaming the streets of Long Beach with friends.
“I’d come to school for art and lunch and then go home,” recalled Shana, now 16. “I’d be out with the wrong group of friends.” Shana’s problems began when she had trouble grasping the material taught in school. “I wasn’t understanding it like everyone else so I thought ‘well maybe something is wrong with me,’” she said.
After four months of skipping school, she landed in a summer school math class with teacher Margaret Butler. She laughed when she recalled running through the halls away from Butler, who would do her best to get Shana to class.
“We didn’t get along during the school yeah and in the summer … she was my math teacher,” Shana said.
But Butler’s class turned out to be the catalyst that Shana needed to turn her life around, since she not only passed the class, but also formed a bond with her teacher. “I don’t think she really knew how it changed my life,” Shana said.
With a newfound outlook on life, Shana left Long Beach High School and began attending the Nassau BOCES Program for Alternative Education (PACE) last September. Each morning Shana hops on a bus from her home in Long Beach to attend the small school, which is tucked away on a nature preserve in Brookville.
With smaller classes and teachers that related to their students, Shana found herself on the honor roll after the first quarter. “After you are failing for a whole year and then you get on the honor roll, it’s a big thing,” she said.
With the year almost over, she is still pulling high marks and will graduate in January 2011 -- six months early -- with hopes that she will attend business school to become an accountant.
“I knew she had the potential,” said David Patrick, Shana’s father, who has been helping her study for the SATs. “Just doing this has proven the fact that if you give kids attention and help them focus they can excel.”
