This is the first of two columns about an urban middle school that specializes in helping adolescents who’ve already failed in other schools.

Rob DeBlois is an educational cowboy. Not that he’s so macho — his wheelchair isn’t standard issue among Marlboro men. But he wasn’t content merely to work with challenging urban students. No, he wanted to rescue urban kids who were already academic failures. Seventh- and eighth-graders, no less — failures going through puberty. Fun City.

But, as DeBlois says, “Ninth grade is where most kids make the decision to drop out. So middle school is our last chance to catch youth that are adrift.”

Back in 1989, DeBlois gathered his first staff of fellow cowboys to create the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Project (UCAP). Every year, UCAP gives 140 kids a second chance to get on track to graduate from high school.

To understand how daunting this work is, you must understand the kids themselves and their very troubled lives. Fortunately, filmmaker Timothy Hotchner hung out at the school during the school year 2004-05, shooting about 250 hours of film. The resulting documentary opens a window onto the realities of trying to educate kids growing up in the wilds of urban life.

Called Accelerating America, this warts-and-all movie shows that UCAP wins some and loses some. The school is the educational equivalent of a pediatric cancer hospital. They rejoice when they succeed, and celebrate that they’re always getting a little better at what they do. But it’s a fight, for every kid’s life.

Back in 1989, long before Rhode Island’s charter law, DeBlois sweet-talked three urban school districts into letting UCAP try to ramp up some of their students — those who ought to be in 7th or 8th grade, but had fallen behind. Often woefully behind. The Providence district sends the most kids. East Providence and now Cranston are part of the collaborative. The movie was shot the year the City of Pawtucket pulled out of the project, raining down personal and budget angst on the school.

The carrot UCAP dangles in front of the kids is the promise that if they do the work they can finish two grade levels in one year — thus “accelerating.” They can join their peers in the 10th grade at a regular high school, and go on to live the big dreams we see the teachers encouraging them to have.

But they have to do the work. They can’t learn math or reading any way other than completing assignments, listening in class and reading the books. UCAP kids usually come with horrible academic habits and toxic attitudes toward school. Kids look at the camera and explain that they didn’t do their projects because “I didn’t feel like it.” Not defensively; it’s just a fact.

The movie focuses on three kids, Jason, Yazmine and America.

Jason’s past teachers have told him he’s stupid so often and so effectively that even when he gets things right, he sometimes flies into a tantrum about how dumb he is. The day he got accepted at UCAP, his dad left the family. He talks a lot about missing his dad, as do the other two students, who also have dads missing in action. Jason is a success story. We see him start to get a little confidence, then to achieve, and finally get into the high school of his choice.

Angry Yazmine is already 16. Even if UCAP does succeed, she’ll be 20 if and when she graduates from high school. At the end we see her give a graduation speech, so we know she’s also one of the successes. An epilogue adds that she finished her high school degree at Job Corps, an excellent program for youth over 18. But while at UCAP she vacillates between powerful, inarticulate depressions and eruptions of a defiant, in-your-face attitude that would drive anyone crazy.

In perhaps my favorite moment, Yazmine and DeBlois are locked in a disciplinary standoff. She constantly blows off the consequences for her behavior, and her mom’s sick of hearing the school complain about her daughter. DeBlois tries to talk Yazmine into taking control of herself, but can’t. I saw the movie with an audience that groaned as she flounced away, not having any of it. As DeBlois is wheeled out of his office after the fight, he says with a grim smile, “It’s enough to make you not like children.” That got a big laugh. It’s so frustrating.

And the most heartbreaking child is America, sweet, articulate and freckle-faced. Social services removed her from her mom’s home, and when we meet her she’s living with a passionately well-intentioned foster mom. The two are not a good match. Foster Mom and America live in two different worlds that only grow farther apart during the course of the year. America is wild, tethered to no family or any other civilizing force. The mom says she’s “like trying to contain the wind.”

In one scene, America tells us that she’d heard second hand that her mom had moved back to the Dominican Republic, without even calling her to say goodbye. America refuses to believe it, so she gets on a bus to go see for herself. Indeed, the mom is gone. As America tells the story, the camera watches her disintegrate. In her shoes, you and I would be also be acting out big time.

And in the end, America runs away — from home, from school. The epilogue tells us that she had a baby. So the chaos-and-poverty cycle starts again.

This is not work for the faint-hearted. Like cancer doctors, the UCAP staff has to tolerate some soul-wrenching failures. They have to be brave while working out on the frontiers with lots of unknowns. Failures are lessons. UCAP learns from each and continues tweaking their program to improve it.

Education is these kids’ only ticket out of the urban wilds.

Next week we’ll take a closer look at the school’s program and its latest innovation.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.