THE FACTORY.(Bostons' Pacific Rim charter public school)(Biography)

A year ago in September, strangeness was afoot in Boston. A gorilla roamed the streets of Dorchester, and the Red Sox made the playoffs. Water droplets on the window of an ophthalmology clinic coalesced into the shape of the Madonna and Child, and forty thousand pilgrims came to marvel. A burly seventeen-year-old from Roxbury named Rousseau Mieze, a child of Haitian immigrants, welcomed any climate obliging to miracles. His family was poor, his high-school grades were mediocre, and he wanted to go to college.

Rousseau had felt burdened as a child by his unusual name. He was pleased to discover, not long ago, that he shared it with an eighteenth-century French philosopher who wrote of institutional inequity, lost childhood, and other matters about which Rousseau had some insight. As he began his senior year in high school, however, such knowledge left him less philosophical than glum. He was six feet two and two hundred and fifty pounds; adults sometimes crossed the street when they saw him. And yet some mornings it was an effort just to open the door to his school--two floors of a former Westinghouse factory in a landscape of rotting pallets and obsolescent gears. "Academy of the Pacific Rim," a cardboard sign taped at the entrance said. His mother, Cazilda, who was a cleaning woman, had forced him to enroll, and he knew now that he'd been lucky. Other urban high schools greeted their students with pat-downs and metal-detecting wands. Pacific Rim, a charter school, opened up to a stairwell the color of canaries, on which his classmates had painted exhortations. "We are what we repeatedly do," Aristotle said, apparently; on optimistic days, taking the steps two at a time, Rousseau would say those words, too. On other days, his own words drowned out Aristotle's:

My life yo I'm thankful, On the real I feel I'll tank though, I feel like death is hangin' on my ankle.

Rousseau once wrote lyrics about money and girls, "your standard rapper concerns." But writing, his English teachers insisted, was also a way for a person to listen to himself, and he was working with fresh themes. One was the regulation of desire. With prayer and self-discipline, he had found, he could suppress his yearnings for random female companionship and the fubu jerseys that other kids wore. "Two-hundred-dollar shoes? Invented necessity," he'd tell his friends. "Really, what's the point?" But he knew that there was a difference between an expensive four-year college education and the one he could get at the community colleges and trade schools of Roxbury. In his journal, Rousseau had scribbled a list of reasons for coveting the pricier variety: "get good job," "support parents," and "experience life outside of the strain of being poor." Long-term strategy was not his forte, however, and now his miscalculation became clear. His S.A.T. scores of eleven hundred were above the national average; he'd been class president repeatedly, and could discourse on Homer when required. But three years of nonchalance toward ordinary schoolwork had given him a cumulative grade-point average of C-minus. "Maybe you can't make a new beginning to your life," teachers sometimes said to kids in his position. "You can, though, make a new ending." The kids, of course, knew the real-world proviso: It's easier to improve your ending if you don't begin so far behind.

"You know the stressed-out review period before the exams?" Rousseau said. "It's like this whole senior year is one big review--your final opportunity to show colleges what you can do, to say, 'I am more than my numbers.' But, on some level, you don't know what you can do yourself. Maybe your teachers say you're smart, a leader, have potential, whatever. But you're kind of wondering if the numbers might be right."

If he was rich and able to write a check for tuition, Rousseau suspected, some college might take a chance on him. If he was a promising point guard, he'd be golden. As much as he loved pickup games at a court up the slope from his apartment, he was exasperated by the cultural assumption that the dreams of tall, black kids involved not B.A.s but the N.B.A. Pacific Rim didn't care for competitive sports, anyway; it asked students to change their prospects by using their minds.

In the seven years since it opened, the Pacific Rim charter public school, which serves sixth to twelfth graders, has hopped around southern Boston, holding classes in a church attic, a former barbershop, and on the second floor of a parochial school called Most Precious Blood. Rising rents have driven Pacific Rim ever farther from the hub of Boston; it now sits in Hyde Park, the city's southernmost tip. Amtrak trains pass within a few feet of the factory it shares with two Hummer-driving white rappers, construction companies, and a metalworking shop. Train shrieks are something that the faculty have been learning to ignore, just as students have been learning, sometimes the hard way, that the abandoned coils of concertina wire behind the school are best stepped over, not on.