Gateway gives runaway fresh start

Bethesda teen earns high school degree through Montgomery College program

Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Submitted photo courtesy of David Satter Claire Satter dropped out of school and ran away from home when she was 16. She recently earned her high school diploma through the Gateway to College program at Montgomery College.

Few people believed she would ever finish high school.

Now, just three years later, Satter, 19, is the first person to earn her high school diploma through Montgomery College’s Gateway to College Program, which gives at-risk students an opportunity to simultaneously earn high school and college credits.

‘‘I felt good about it, I felt good about going to school,” said Satter, who once hated school. ‘‘I hope to be successful.”

She credits the Gateway program with giving her that hope.

The program serves 16- to 20-year-olds who have stopped attending county public high schools and who are at risk of not getting their diploma.

For many students, the program is a better fit than the traditional high school setting, said Amy Crowley, program director.

‘‘For some of the students it’s the [high school] schedule. They can’t do the 7:30 to 2,” she said. ‘‘You have some kids who feel they don’t fit in with the high school social setting. Some of them are very bright and didn’t feel they were being challenged. We have some who feel that they should be treated as adults, and that was very much the case with Claire.”

As a student at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Claire felt like she was involved in a power struggle with teachers and administrators.

‘‘I think I felt like I definitely thought I was a grown up and I felt like I wanted to be independent,” she said. ‘‘There would be petty rules that I wouldn’t agree with. There were a lot of things I felt passionately about and I wanted to explain how I felt, like an adult would. I wanted to be talked to like a grown up, but I felt like I was being treated like a kid.”

To learn more For more information on the Gateway to College Program at Montgomery College, visit http:⁄⁄www.montgomerycollege.edu⁄Departments⁄mcmcps⁄gateway⁄index.htm.

That strong desire for independence, coupled with depression and emotional problems, led Satter not only to drop out of school, but also to run away from home.

Panhandling for food and money, Satter hitchhiked her way to Baltimore, New York and eventually to Seattle.

‘‘I didn’t have a change of clothes. I didn’t have a penny,” she said. ‘‘I didn’t have a sweater. All I had were the shirt, pants, shoes I had on me and I was able to make it across the country.”

The taste of independence was great, she said, and she didn’t worry about getting hurt or what she might do next.

‘‘I was pretty fearless,” she said.

Still, after nearly two months, she returned to her mother’s house in Bethesda. Instead of going to school, she worked for several months at the Bethesda Community Store. And while she enjoyed working, she said, even that got old after a while. She decided to give high school at B-CC another try.

‘‘I always liked working and I had a couple of friends, but I got bored and I got lonely. Everyone else was in school,” she said. ‘‘I had to fight for them to let me back into the high school. I started with good intentions but there’s just something about high school.”

Once again, she felt like she wasn’t being taken seriously at school, she didn’t feel like she had a lot in common with other students and she didn’t feel like her classes were challenging.

‘‘The classes were so easy you could skip classes and still get an A, no problem,” she said. ‘‘So I started skipping more and more classes and missing exercises, so then I started failing, even though it was easy.”

Then she found out about the Gateway program through a friend who had dropped out of high school.

The Gateway to College program was first developed by Portland Community College. Montgomery College was chosen as one of two other schools in the country to replicate the program in the fall 2004 semester.

Each semester, 60 students are accepted to the program and divided into three ‘‘Learning Communities” made up of 20 students. Each learning community attends classes at one of the college’s three campuses.

During their first semester, students take college preparation classes. After that, they enroll in college level courses that will also fulfill their high school requirements.

About 65 to 70 percent of the students transition from the preparation stage into the college-level classes, Crowley said. Most of those will take two to three years to earn their high school diploma, depending on how many credits they need and their academic abilities, she said.

‘‘We tell them what we expect up front. We lay it out for them,” she said. ‘‘They’re on a college campus. You are treating them as college students. We probably have higher expectations for them than they’ve ever had in school before.”

That approach was just the type of treatment that Satter needed to motivate her to succeed in school, she said.

‘‘It was my choice,” she said. ‘‘No one’s telling me you have to do this, no one’s following me around. If you don’t do your work, no one tells you to do it. If you fail, it’s your problem.”

She started the program in January 2005 and became the first student to complete it in August. In addition to getting her college diploma, she has completed nearly one year of college.

She is currently staying with her grandmother in France and looking into business programs at universities there. Bilingual in French and English, she hopes to learn Spanish and go into international business, she said.

‘‘I’m very, very happy about [Claire completing the program],” said her father, David Satter. ‘‘In many ways this was a significant accomplishment. I told her that finishing high school is something that most people do, but not everyone has to go through what you went through.”

Satter said he’s seen an enormous change in his daughter since she’s been in the program. It allowed her to earn her diploma without the emotional pressure and condescension she felt in a traditional high school setting, he said.

‘‘There was one point at which the people treating her said she would never go to college and probably wouldn’t finish high school,” Satter said. ‘‘That proved to be too pessimistic.”