At first glance, the building at the end of the new road outside Westminster looks like any modern school.
Architects included plenty of windows in the design. Brand-new computers abound in its classrooms. Kids jockey for position along a stainless steel lunch counter that serves up such school cafeteria standards as chicken nuggets, crinkle-cut fries and Jell-O.
The differences are subtle.
Classroom windows are placed high in the wall, allowing natural light to flood in but preventing easily distracted students from gazing out.
There are plastic forks and spoons - but no knives - in this cafeteria.
And when these students gathered on the first day of school last week, their chatter wasn't limited to summer vacations and new cars. Often, they gossiped about who got in trouble over the summer break, which friends got locked up and who's awaiting a court date.
Housed for years in a makeshift facility in rented office space, Carroll County's Gateway School has a new $5.4 million building. It's a place for middle and high school students facing long-term suspensions or struggling with learning disabilities or behavioral and emotional problems.
There, they have a more structured setting in which they are held accountable for their actions but not forever penalized for past mistakes.
"This is a second chance for them, a clean slate," said Janice Moore, a crisis and guidance counselor at the school who described part of her job as persuading incoming students that their past faults don't matter to her. "They don't have to live with that burden here. This is a do-over for them."
Many of the 94 students who currently attend Gateway relish that opportunity.
Among them is 15-year-old Tommy Troiano, a 5-foot-6, muscular freshman who was kicked out of two schools in two years "for fights and other stuff" before being sent to Gateway last year.
Among the "other stuff" was an assault charge stemming from a fight, he said, in which "a boy beat up two girls, I thought that was wrong, so I beat him up." On his first day of school last week, Tommy declared this to be the year he would "turn over a new leaf."
An adult, early
Just down the hall sits Cristopher Hamilton, 18, a lanky, red-haired senior who has lived on his own since his mother died of a drug overdose last year. Before he found a place to rent in Finksburg, Cris spent most of his nights sleeping beside a highway near school.
With no extended family to take him in and his father in Florida, he went to court to legally shed his status as a minor. He doesn't have to be in school - but he is, because he wants the type of job that's more easily had with a high school diploma.
And there's Brittany Decker, a bright, skinny 16-year-old senior with a piercing that hugs the arch of her eyebrow and an unabashed appreciation for the teachers and staff who work to understand her.
She doesn't mind school so much, would like to enroll in nursing school next year and prefers Gateway to Westminster High, where she said she got in trouble for fighting and for bringing Advil to school.
Like many of her classmates, Brittany is fighting a sickness - bipolar disorder, in her case - that makes school difficult and that transforms her from outgoing and energetic one minute to scowling and sullen the next.
"People think Gateway is a bad school for bad kids just like Hickey [the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School for juvenile offenders], but it's not like that," Tommy said. "People put you in here to help you. ... This school is hot, yo. I love this school."
Turning lives around
Most Maryland school systems have some kind of alternative program - evening course offerings or a wing of a school - for students who have not succeeded in traditional academic environments. About half have distinct schools for the youngsters with the rockiest of backgrounds and the most volatile histories of classroom conduct.
It's in these buildings, school administrators and state education officials say, where nontraditional teaching methods finally register, where lives slowly are turned around. Along the way, many of these teens shake their reputations as hoodlums and troublemakers, gain role models, conquer addictions and manage to earn that otherwise elusive diploma or transfer back to their home school.
In some cases, such tidy outcomes seem unimaginable at the start of the school year.
There are kids at Carroll County's Gateway School who have been sent there for using drugs, for bringing guns or knives to school, for threatening staff or students or for getting caught smoking at school at least four times. Students also are there for help dealing with emotional problems, such as depression or the lingering effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, and for intensive special education.
But Gateway's roster also includes students who ask to be transferred there because they feel bullied or alienated or overwhelmed at another school.
