Alternative Ed: Segregation or Solution?(debate over alternative education legislation, Illinois)(Statistical Data Included)

Next spring, Tenesha Anderson will leave high school with two things she was not sure she would ever get: a diploma and a career.

After graduating from Aspen Alternative High School in south suburban Robbins, the 19-year-old senior will study at Moraine Valley Community College, in Palos Hills, to be a medical technician.

"I kind of got kicked out," she said of her old school, Dwight D. Eisenhower High School in nearby Blue Island. "I was getting in trouble all the time." But the smaller class sizes and closer supervision at Aspen has kept Anderson focused.

This January state officials will implement the Alternative Learning Opportunities Law, a new measure they hope will serve more youth with similar challenges.

Currently, alternative schools serve students like Anderson who have not succeeded in traditional classrooms--those who've been expelled, chronic truants, dropouts and pregnant girls. But the new law will allow districts to get state approval to place children defined as "at-risk of academic failure" in alternative programs.

Critics said the law is a radical expansion of alternative education and part of a troubling trend of separating struggling students from their regular classrooms. They also warn that the law is vague, and was developed without the help of advocates and parents, which they find even more worrisome, given that one of the biggest changes to state education policy is just over the horizon. Governor George H. Ryan has assembled a task force to overhaul the Illinois School Code, the body of law that governs 4,290 public schools and more than 2 million students statewide.

Although parent advocates and other groups said they were belatedly invited to advise Ryan on the school code, Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Chicago-based Parents United for Responsible Education, said the effort is "top-loaded with [education] providers and lawyers" and "not a whole lot of representatives who advocate for children and families."

The new law has also sharpened an ongoing debate over the direction of alternative education, The Chicago Reporter has found. The law is one of a series, including the 1995 Alternative Public Schools Act, that have diverted alternative education from its original mission, according to school reform advocates, parents groups and civil rights organizations. They fear that, rather than helping students with special needs, the new programs or schools could result in segregation.

"It just all seemed like another convenient tool for [the] discarding of more and more children at a very young age who were considered too needy, or troubled, or, worse yet, troublesome," said Michelle Light, an attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University Legal Clinic. "And, of course, those children would be mostly poor and minority."

Others discount the threat of segregation. "I don't accept that," said Martin L. Barrett, regional superintendent of schools for downstate Champaign and Ford counties. He chairs the Alternative Education Coalition, whose 46 members, mostly school superintendents, state officials and alternative education…