Every work day at 9 a.m., some of the toughest teenagers in New York City invade the southernmost tip of the financial district. In baggy pants and shiny sneakers, well-worn backpacks slung over their shoulders, they rush past the revolving doors of the Whitehall Building, an elegant neo-Renaissance office tower directly across from Battery Park. They pass the men in dark suits and squeeze through a drab aluminum frame side entrance in time for the start of classes at John V. Lindsay Wildcat Charter School, the pride of Amalia Betanzos.

In the field of social programs for the poor, where funds and methods change with the political tides, Betanzos, the chief executive of Wildcat Service Corporation, has spent the past 12 years creating and running a program that has achieved an enviable success record in transforming troubled adolescents into responsible adults.

Only eight percent of Wildcat’s students drop out of school, compared to a citywide public school average of 20 percent. With class sizes of no more than 15 students and obligatory internships, the Wildcat schools – there are actually four of them – indicate that if given a chance, at-risk kids are just as eager to learn as any others. New York City’s school chancellor Joel L. Klein draws heavily on Wildcat’s concept for his New Beginnings schools, a special program for troubled students within his plan to overhaul the city’s public school system. Wildcat’s schools serve as a national example, and its approach has been replicated in Chile and Venezuela as well.

Betanzos, at age 75, with thin dyed red hair framing her stern but elegant face, exudes calm and compassion when she talks about her school, the awards her students reap and how well they perform on standardized tests. “The school is really my baby,” she said.

The school is part of Wildcat’s mission is to provide a variety of programs of last resort. Since Betanzos took charge of Wildcat in 1978, she has managed to keep the non-profit provider afloat thoughout the administrations of four different mayors. Wildcat has evolved from a criminal offenders work program to one of the city’s largest service providers for welfare mothers, former criminal offenders and troubled youth. Since 1972, its programs have trained, counseled or placed into jobs more than 80,000 of the city’s most disadvantaged citizens.

The shift to a major focus on adolescents came during the past decade because in Betanzos’ view, dropping out of school is the first stop on the road to crime and welfare.

Inside the school’s space, student paintings in garish colors plaster the walls of its narrow hallway, a bright contrast to the office building’s gray linoleum floors, blue-framed doors and cold fluorescent lightning. Classrooms are small. The shelves of each room are crammed with binders and books.

Though the school day starts typically at 9 a.m., it goes on until 5 p.m., a full two hours longer than normal high schools, and there is no summer vacation. All year long the students alternate between classes one week and an internship the next.

For high schoolers, it is an exhausting schedule. But Jessica de la Rosa, a 20-year-old graduate of the program, beams when she remembers her years at the Wildcat academy. “It’s more like a family than a school. People were polite, nice, and sweet,” she said, sitting in the electronic wheelchair necessitated by a congenital birth defect. De la Rosa’s arms and feet are deformed.

She is Wildcat’s first physically disabled graduate. In Manhattan’s Murray Bergtraum high school, de la Rosa skipped almost all classes, arriving at Wildcat Academy in 2000 with only one high school credit. In 2003, she passed the state exam and graduated. Now she is pursuing a college degree in forensics. “It gave me a second chance,” said de la Rosa. “If I would not have come here, I would not be in college.”

Her story is not uncommon. All of Wildcat’s 157 students in Manhattan, who are aged between 16 and 21, have run into serious trouble at their previous schools. According to Ron Tabano, Wildcat’s principal, a quarter of them have some history with the court system. Most of the students are black or Hispanics; a few are Asian.

They come from troubled family backgrounds. Once, Betanzos said, one of Wildcat’s teachers let his students write poems about the person they loved most. Although many of them live in single-parent homes, they did not write about their mothers. Some of those teenagers grow up in families where there is no loving adult at all.

They have nobody to lean on, to support them, Betanzos said. “We find more and more of that. And that’s kind of scary.”

Wildcat tries to provide a safe haven for these kids, with Betanzos positioning herself as the caring mother figure. It’s a role for which she feels a special obligation. She lost her only son Manuel, a lawyer for the city’s human resource administration department, in 1993. He died after he had fallen from a ladder while painting a house with a group of friends.

Students say that she regularly visits the school which is just a few steps away from her office. Some of them have chatted with her informally in the hallway. Their descriptions range from “cool, very humble lady” to “really sweet, very caring and warm.” She is, however, anything but soft. A few years ago, Betanzos had a serious argument with one of Wildcat’s criminal offenders. The young man did not bother to go his training lessons, so Betanzos told him that he would have to leave the program.

“You’ll be very sorry if you let me go,” he threatened her. Betanzos reply was sharp: “You don’t know what you are talking about. Every day, when you get to the sixth floor, you don’t know who is in the elevator with you. We’ve got a lot of people in this program that have killed other people. And you should know that they all love me. If anything happens to me, you’ll be dead.” The young man never missed another class.

Betanzos demands the strict enforcement of rules. Students have to be on time, they have to hand in their homework, and if they do not show up at school, their teachers call the parents. “They don’t tolerate violence at all in my school. If you have a fight with somebody, if you lay your hand on somebody, you will get kicked out,” said Ghanem Karim, an 18-year-old with frizzy hair and oversized pants. But that, he said, happened very rarely.

The school offers a combination of vocational training and school education, and has a small staff that teaches with a flexible curriculum. Teachers know their students by name, and can easily tell when trouble is brewing. As a result, the students get a lot more attention than in the overcrowded public schools they come from. It’s almost like a public private education.

Originally, the school started out as an alternative high school under a unique contract with the city’s Board of Education. In 1999, Wildcat Academy applied for charter school status. One year later, it was granted a five-year contract. The charter school status gives Wildcat more flexibility in its curriculum. The internships help the kids to get in touch with the real world.

Next year, Wildcat will add a culinary institute to train students as waiters. But the biggest challenge for 2005 will be the renewal of the charter by the state’s Institute for Charter Schools.

Many experts see Wildcat’s approach as exemplary and laud the connection Wildcat makes between education and vocational training. “It’s not an excuse,” said Sharon Vangen of Women City Club, who has authored a study on charter schools. Other education and work combinations focus on the vocational training and lower their academic standards. But Wildcat, said Vangen, maintains the same standards as any other public school.

Although Chancellor Klein plans to open up 40 new charter schools in the next year alone, not all agree that Wildcat’s model should be the future of public education. ”It’s a second chance. But if the [public] school system did a better job, you would not go,” said Noreen Connell, executive director of Education Priorities Panel, a coalition of 28 education watchdog groups.

It’s a question that Betanzos does not entertain. She prefers to be a marketer for her cause, to help minorities overcome poverty. With her silky voice and intense stare, Betanzos can explain endlessly why her school is successful. She speaks in an even tone, with little gestures, and the right amount of drama to make a point. When she talks about the flexibility for teachers, for instance, she illustrates the point with a drastic example.

“I tell them: If you want to teach, and you come in and tell me that you need a barge to teach the kids math, a barge in the middle of the river, I’ll buy you a barge. But all your kids have to be able to come to school every day and to pass the state exam.”

With this kind of rhetoric, she has charmed participants at innumerable meetings, symposiums, and commissions. Mark Hoover, first deputy commissioner of human resource administration under Mayor Giuliani, described her as an effective administrator who really believed in her cause.

Some of that missionary zeal stems from Betanzos’ own history. She grew up poor in the Bronx, as the child of Puerto Rican and Spanish immigrants. She worked and graduated from New York University in 1950 with a major in biology. At that time, doing social service was not high up on her agenda. She married, moved to Manhattan and worked in a hospital for a few years before she took time off to raise her son Manuel. During that time, she became involved in the civil rights movement of the Puerto Rican community.

In 1967 she plunged into social work. Betanzos started working fulltime as president of the Puerto Rican Community Development Project, where she tried to find entry-level jobs for an impoverished community. Two years later, she became involved in John D. Lindsay’s mayoral campaign. It was a decision that shaped her future career and her belief in education. “He was a politician that I tremendously admired,” she said. “I ride along with his philosophy in that everybody can learn, everybody must be given a chance to learn, and then they can do well.”

Lindsay became her mentor. When he was mayor, Betanzos climbed the ranks. She worked as special assistant for poor communities and housing and quickly became commissioner of relocation and of youth services.

Her time in the administration ended in 1978, when she joined Wildcat, but the political ties remained. Since then, she has chaired the New York commission on the status of women, she has been a member of the city’s commission on constitutional revision, she is a former member of the board of education, and she has served for many years as the chairperson of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, a group of 120 advocacy groups.

Despite her political acumen, Wildcat has had some difficulties in the last two years. After September 2001, Wildcat almost abandoned its Private Industry Partnership (PIP) initiative. The 32-week program trained welfare recipients for entry level jobs in the finance industry, with training contents fine-tuned to the needs of corporate partners such as Citibank and Chase Manhattan.

Graduates had guaranteed internships, and most of them landed a long-term job afterwards. Media touted its tie-in with big business as a novel and highly successful approach to battling unemployment. But in winter 2001, the program came to a stop.

Betanzos argued that Wildcat suspended the program due to the financial industry’s economic stories. But that seems to be only part of the story. About the same time when the PIP initiative lost its drive, Jeffrey Jablow, the senior vice president responsible for the PIP, left Wildcat. Jablow and Betanzos declined to comment on the reason behind his departure. Wildcat plans to revive the PIP initiative with a new team this year, but its scope is still unclear.

Financially, Wildcat is heavily dependent on city funding. About 80 percent of Wildcat’s budget come from the city, 9 percent from the state, 1 percent are federal funds, and only 10 percent are from private donors. The profound reliance on city money made life difficult for Wildcat in the last two years, when city funding declined sharply.

But Betanzos swept away any concern over the financial drain with one single generality. “Everybody has hard cuts. We work very hard – with less.”

There was just one time when she stopped working for a brief period. That was in 1993, following the death of her son, at age 39.

At that point, she faced two choices: Either to stay home or to pick up work again. She went back to Wildcat within a week. Her husband, a poet and university teacher, gave his next lecture a couple of days after the accident.
Betanzos and her husband took an unusual step to cope with their loss. They invested all the inheritance that would have gone to their late son to start the Manuel Betanzos Foundations.

“I don’t wear fur, we drive an old car,” said Betanzos. “We figured that both of us have everything we need, so all our resources can go to the Betanzos Foundations.”

Manuel loved animals, so the Betanzos set up a shelter for abandoned animals in Spain. More important, Manuel liked children, so his parents decided to help the children of her husband’s birthplace Rociana del Condado, a small rural village in Huelva, Spain. In 1994, the couple bought a house in the village that would become a center for the area’s disabled youth. The foundation prepares disabled local children – those with both mental and physical issues — for the first grade. Psychotherapists and physicians serve children from the surrounding five villages, free of charge.

About three years ago, when Betanzos sat in a little seafood restaurant near Rociana, a woman came up to her and told her: “I want to tell you: Manuel Betanzos saved my son’s life.” Betanzos did remember the child: He was a “big, fat, blonde” kid with psychological problems. The kid had clung to his mother, he wouldn’t walk or speak. But at her foundation, a psychologist and a physiotherapist had worked on him, and after that, he managed to finish the first grade.

“Do you want to meet him?” asked his mother.
Yes, Betanzos replied. “So the husband and the son come over, we shake hands, and he says ‘Hello, Ms. Betanzos. I really wanted to meet you. I am doing very well, I love school.’ And he gave me a kiss.” It was then, said Betanzos, that she thought “My son died for something. Good things are happening because of him. So it wasn’t all in vain.”

Recently, a few days before Easter Sunday, a handful of students stood around a huge dark brown table in Wildcat academy’s conference room. In the background, a flashlight went off periodically. All of the students were on spring break, but they had come to the school for their graduation photo. They talked about how different the school was from the big institutions they had attended previously.

“Teachers here, they understand that you made mistakes,” said
Eddy Diaz, a black kid with a white oversized t-shirt. “They saw that I wanted to better myself.” Added Ghanem Karim, who graduates this summer and plans to study architecture, “Ms. Betanzos, she seems like a person that wants you to succeed.”

Amalia Betanzos would not have put it differently.

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