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

Fidgety middle-school kids are sitting at a kidney-shaped table, staring straight ahead, captivated by the fun, dramatic reading style of English teacher Jeff Guillemette.

It’s the “Intervention period,” or I-period, at the Urban Collaborative Accelerated Project, a half-hour, twice-a-week course designed to shore up specific skills among a group of students. Every teacher has an intervention group during I-period.

Actually, UCAP itself is one big academic intervention in the lives of students already at least one grade level below their peers. They’re supposed to be in grades 7 to 9, but many have been held back repeatedly. UCAP is a last chance for these kids to get themselves on track to a conventional high-school diploma. With their own hard work, UCAP can help them complete three academic years in two.

Guillemette is reading God’s Plan for Wolfie and X-Ray, by David Rice. On the table are saucer-sized stop signs, cut from heavy, colored paper, with a tongue depressor for a handle. Kids don’t interrupt; they hold up a sign and keep it up until Guillemette stops at a convenient place and recognizes the student.

“I have a comment,” says a boy whose sign says “Comment.” While he works on articulating a clear thought, a girl starts fishing around until she finds and holds up a big lollipop that says “Question.” Others say things like “clarification,” “prediction,” and “inference.” These kids are working on mastering eight reading strategies that will help them think about and then comprehend what the author is saying. The boy’s comment prompts Guillemette to ask what specifically in the text provides the basis for the boy’s remarks. The students go digging through the pages, as if diving for facts were a competitive sport.

Normally, children learn these strategies by the fourth grade, when they switch from learning to reading to learn. But UCAP’s students come with so many holes in their educations, their academic foundations have the structural integrity of Swiss cheese. Holes may have developed because their families moved them from school to school, or from another country. Some kids have been socially promoted, and others have undiagnosed needs. In any case, it takes time, money, endless encouragement and special strategies to back-fill academic deficits so a kid is building skills and knowledge on a solid grounding.

Chris Cuthbertson, UCAP’s director of curriculum and instruction, says, “The UCAP kids are not just behind, their education is a hodge-podge. They’re meeting the standard in math, but not in ELA (English Language Arts). So how do we get them all on track and keeping pace so they’re ready to learn at a high school level?”

Every five weeks, UCAP assesses all their students to figure out whether the current strategy to “accelerate” their learning is working. If not, the school needs to intervene quickly with more intense help. These kids have lost enough time as it is.

As is their wont, the UCAP staff got together for two days last summer to brainstorm about what more they could do to help their challenged students. The result was this I-period. Every teacher designs five-week minicourses in, for example, finding the surface area of three-dimensional objects. Cuthbertson and Erin Schenck, UCAP’s “one-woman special-education department,” oversee the I-period program.

Cuthbertson says, “Our report cards allow us to see exactly who didn’t pass the math test, or who has not yet met the standard in what we call ‘publications,’ which is essays and writing.

So, for example, we see a kid who got an unsatisfactory in ‘home reading.’ (Kids must write journals about the reading that they do at home.) But there are other kids who also got unsatisfactory. So we design a class. Our reports come out every five weeks, and the kids see everything. The kids know if the intervention is working. Sometimes they request a certain intervention. And some kids are accelerating well, so we offer them something they want, like keyboarding or art club. But it’s all called I-period.”

Schenck says, “Then we assess. Did the intervention work? [Did Guillemette’s kids learn those strategies and become better readers?] The assessment tells us if the kid can move out of intervention, or does it need to be more intense?”

As Cuthberton says, “We’re a whatever-it-takes school.”

Already the staff is chaffing at the shortness of the mere half hour for I-period. But this is perfect fodder for next summer’s conversation. The faculty is encouraged about the good that has come out of the experiment, including inspiring the teachers to innovate. Guillemette’s signs were just such an I-period innovation, and they’ve begun to show up in his regular classes.

The library-media specialist, Darshell Silva, designed an I-period to give those kids who were behind on their home-reading journals time to write the journals on a computer. It turns out that some kids happily comply with the requirement if they can do it on a computer. Lesson learned: give those kids special access to the computers so they can get their journals done. Getting that problem solved will liberate the I-period for them to work on other skills.

District schools regularly flunk, or “hold back,” kids not meeting standards, instead of intervening and filling in the holes. This makes a bad situation worse. Regular school districts can’t possibly reproduce UCAP’s work, because their intensely regulated schools have no flexibility for the whatever-it-takes approach.

UCAP educators must work tightly as a team to provide the kids with proper time, patience and monitoring, but without breaking the budget. The UCAP staff believes that the program wouldn’t work in a school with more than its 140 students since strong community and personal support are essential ingredients in their success. And even with all that, as I pointed out last week, UCAP does not succeed with every kid.

The Urban Ed Task Force is recommending UCAP as a program that should be replicated throughout the state. Robert DeBlois, director of UCAP, says, “There needs to be a viable alternative available for all kids who really need one. UCAP has been at this 20 years now, and it kills me that there are no other such schools, despite the fact that everyone agrees we need them, and that they can make a difference in the dropout rate. What in God’s name are we waiting for?”

What, indeed?

Correction to last week’s column: The third district in the UCAP collaborative is Central Falls, not East Providence.

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.