What is it like to go to a school next to a cocktail lounge?

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Every weekday a few minutes before 8 a.m., more than a dozen teen-agers line up in front of The Lobby cocktail lounge in a strip mall located in a blue-collar neighborhood.Across the street is an adult book club. Down the block is a gentlemen's club featuring exotic dancers.Exactly at 8 a.m., a weathered steel security door opens next to the glass-door entrance to the bar. A guard with a cigarette dangling from his lips begins searching the teen-agers, mostly African Americans, patting the boys down for weapons and looking into the backpacks of both boys and girls.Time for school.The Life Skills Center of Southeast Columbus is part of a 17-school chain operated by the for-profit White Hat Management firm of Akron, Ohio. The schools offer "dropout-recovery" programs meant to serve students who have failed in traditional high schools. Absenteeism is extremely high, and students who actually graduate are in the minority."The White Hat schools have routinely been the largest chain with the worst academic performance year to year," said Lisa Zelner, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Federation of Teachers, a teacher lobbying group. "We found that the for-profit companies are posting much lower performance ratings than are traditional public schools."The schools run by White Hat Management, as well as other dropout recovery schools, consistently report far below average attendance and graduation rates.Part of the reason, critics say, is the teaching method.After walking through the security checkpoint, students at the Columbus campus are ushered into one of three large rooms lined with dozens of computer cubicles. They don headsets and stare at pre-programmed lessons about basic mathematics, science, geography and English.Two teachers sit in the middle of the room to take attendance and answer questions. But the students, mostly, are tethered to their computers for most of their three-hour learning experience. Officials for the Ohio Department of Education said a three-hour day can meet the state's minimum requirements as long as students also get credit for their work experience in part-time or full-time jobs."The schoolwork was very easy. But I wasn't given the education I needed. I wasn't given what I needed to succeed in college," said Amanda Littrell, 22, who attended the Life Skills Center at Middletown, Ohio.Littrell transferred from a traditional high school into the Life Skills program in her sophomore year and graduated the same year, getting her high-school diploma two years early. But she failed her admissions test for Cincinnati State Technical and Community College and is bitter about the quality of her high-school education."It was so easy to cheat there. I certainly would have gotten a million times better education if I'd stayed in my old high school," Littrell said. "If I could erase going to Life Skills Center and stay in a regular high school, I would."But many students don't show up at all, according to state records and former students."They kind of have an 'oh well' thing," Littrell said of the staff at the Life Skills school. "They don't really care if you don't show up."Justin Greenfield, 21, dropped out of the Middletown campus in 2005. Although his school had enrolled 346 students that year, Greenfield said sometimes he saw only 30 students in class -- sometimes even fewer."At Life Skills, you come and go as you please. It's kind of like a school you go to until you're old enough to drop out," Greenfield said.The people who run the Life Skills Center of Southeast Columbus say they take pride in their program, no matter how gloomy their statistics. Only 45 percent of these students will get a high-school diploma, according to Ohio Department of Education records.And yet, Life Skills Center officials say, their 10-year-old program increasingly is being imitated."We're getting competition," said Monica Jones, a spokeswoman for White Hat Management.School principal Andrew Pasquinilli nods in agreement."Just since our center opened, we've had another community high school open up at the next stoplight," Pasquinilli said."Oh, right by the strip club and the bars and everything?" Jones asked."Yeah, actually it's right behind the strip club," Pasquinilli said. "And there is another dropout-recovery program down by Refugee Road. It's a direct dropout-recovery program like ours. We are seeing more competition."Dropout-recovery programs in Ohio are proliferating, with at least 47 charter high schools specializing in at-risk students popping up around the state since White Hat Management pioneered the business model in 1998.The Ohio Department of Education during the 2007-2008 school year paid White Hat Management $1.5 million to teach 264 students enrolled at the Columbus school.But a headcount by Scripps Howard News Service found that only 122 teen-agers and young adults actually went to class on May 1, a typical school day. It's a figure school officials didn't challenge. Similar checks at Life Skills Center campuses in Akron and Cleveland also found that less than half of enrolled students actually went to class.Neither Jones nor Pasquinilli disputed the counts.According to state calculations, the Life Skills Center of Southeast Columbus averaged 138 students a day during the 2007-2008 school year, although the school was paid for the 264 students on the enrollment list."Every state is different in terms of payment. In Colorado, for instance, on the first of October, every single student is counted to determine funding. It's do-or-die that day," Jones explained."At this school, we are only funded based on the Ohio guidelines. There are no irregularities in our funding. There are no irregularities in our reporting. There is nothing we are doing that is not in accordance with the way, legally, we are supposed to be funded," Jones said.(E-mail Thomas Hargrove at hargrovet(at)shns.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)