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By LEE SHERMAN

A back-to-basics charter school provides home schoolers with a choice they can embrace whole-heartedly.

KENAI, Alaska—Here on the northern half of the planet, the heavens turn predictably around that fixed point of light, the North Star. In much the same way, the daily lives of one Alaska family revolve around a shining little school they've helped create.

Larry and Susan Semmens were among the original members of Aurora Borealis Charter School four years ago when enrollment barely topped 75. They held on through a Mixmaster start-up, when parents and staff sought to blend sometimes-conflicting ideas into a workable reality. As the school began to gel, the Semmenses settled into a routine: making the daily 30-mile round trip in their mud-splattered 4x4 carting the kids to and from school. Susan volunteering in the classroom. Larry chairing the monthly board meetings. Both parents chaperoning field trips. Even in their home, the school has a central presence. While most Americans gather around the television after dinner, this TV-free family huddles over homework at the dining room table. When the assignments are done, Larry reads aloud from classics like Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. The scene is quaint in its simplicity.

It's no coincidence that the three younger Semmens kids—Travis, Trent, and Natalie— excel in school. (The oldest son has grown up and moved away.)

"I want my kids to be challenged," says Susan, a youthful 40-year-old whose long brown hair is touched with gray. "The public schools teach to the lower-performing students. They have a lot to learn about really pushing kids, about letting them reach their full potential."

It wasn't that long ago that the Semmens home was itself a schoolhouse of sorts. Unhappy with a curriculum that seemed "dumbed down," Susan and Larry decided to home school their children. But after seven years of steering them through their lessons, Susan was getting weary. She was ready to retire her red pencil. And about that time, Trent, who was nearing his seventh birthday, was still unable to read. Tests found that he may be dyslexic, and Susan didn't feel equipped to deal with Trent's difficulty in learning to read. So when the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District got the go-ahead from the state to launch several charter schools, Larry and Susan jumped.

Like Little Red Riding Hood's third bowl of porridge, the charter school option seemed "just right."

Geography and Independence

On the map, the Kenai Peninsula looks like an ice skate extending into the Gulf of Alaska just south of Anchorage. When the clouds lift, the craggy south face of the Chugach Mountain range provides a stunning backdrop to the town of Kenai — a modest collection of B&Bs, strip malls, gas stations, and espresso stands. To the west of this recreational hunting and fishing hub, more than a dozen gas and oil rigs with friendly names (Platform Bruce, Dolly Varden Platform), rise from Cook Inlet — testimony to the peninsula's growing dependence on fossil fuel as commercial fishing declines. Bears outnumber humans on this windswept jut of land, where two million acres have been set aside as a national wildlife refuge.

Fifteen miles inland from Kenai, tucked away on a wooded hillside, is the Semmens' simple home. The warmth of the woodstove envelops visitors as they knock the snow or ice from their boots in the cheery kitchen. Susan pours hot tea into delicate china cups decorated with rosebuds. The dainty cups and saucers contrast sharply with the enormous horned head of a Dall sheep that keeps a silent vigil on the living room wall. Beaver pelts ("from the creek down below," Susan offers) drape the backs of comfy armchairs, and a seven-foot length of whale baleen, like a giant's hair comb, hangs below the loft railing. A 66-pound Chinook salmon is preserved for eternity on a plaque above the picture window.

"It's a part of Alaska," Susan explains when she senses a visitor's uneasiness with the animal trophies and skins. She has on occasion waged her own quiet protest. When her husband suggested hanging a bearskin on the wall above the sofa, she quickly pieced together an eye-catching quilt in shades of pink and teal for the spot.

"I had to work fast," she confides with a conspiratorial smile.

Something else that's "a part of Alaska" is home schooling. The state's vast and rugged terrain is one big reason Alaska leads the nation in number of home schoolers per capita, according to Dr. Bryan Ray, President of the National Home Education Research Institute based in Salem, Oregon. The 40-site Kenai Peninsula Borough district alone ranges across 26,000 square miles — an area bigger than West Virginia. Getting to the "neighborhood school" for some requires a ride in a boat or a float-plane. "If we gathered up all the home schoolers on the peninsula and put them into one school, I'm pretty certain it would be bigger than the biggest school currently in the district," says Superintendent Donna Peterson. That school, Interior Distance Education of Alaska (IDEA), enrolls more than 600 students.

But geography is only part of the reason for home schooling's popularity. It also grows from Alaskans' "last frontier" outlook. "It's the attitude of freedom and independence that's so prevalent in Alaska," Peterson says.

While many families, like the Semmenses, do an admirable job of educating their kids, others botch the job. "We've had eighth-graders show up on our doorstep who are simply not prepared to do high school work," says Peterson. The trouble is, home schoolers in Alaska aren't held accountable for results. Charter schools, on the other hand, must spell out their academic goals in advance and measure progress regularly — at least that is the law's intent. So when charter schools started to really take root in the state in 1997, the district saw an opportunity. Here was a chance to attract families back into the public school fold. Charter schools, which are typically small and open to parental input, present an attractive alternative for parents who are jaded on schools they feel are overcrowded, unchallenging, undisciplined, and/or unresponsive to parents' concerns.

"Alaska has been a real home schooling state, and the school districts have been fighting that for at least 10 years," says Susan Semmens. "They've been losing that battle. I think the reason the district wasn't fighting us on the charter school was because we pulled in so many home schoolers the first year. Therefore, they were getting back those per-pupil dollars — or the kids, depending on how you look at it."

Peterson says the charter school option helps the district better fulfill its mission, which is to educate all children on the peninsula. "We want families in the system," she says.

Aurora Borealis is doing its part to reclaim straying families. Former home school and private school pupils account for about half of its current enrollment of just over 100. Another 200 kids are clamoring for a spot. The Semmenses were drawn by the promise of structure, high standards, and close adherence to the three Rs. The day begins with the Pledge of Allegiance. Kids follow a pretty strict dress code — no sports logos or imprinted T-shirts, no wild colors (everything must be red, white, blue, or khaki), no Hawaiian shirts, saggy pants, blue jeans, or platform shoes.

The K-8 charter shares a renovated building with the Boys and Girls Club and an alternative school. The 1960s-era yellow-brick schoolhouse, which has the name of its one-time tenant Kenai Elementary School lettered across its solid countenance, feels in some ways like a throwback to an earlier era. The reasons go way beyond architecture. Walk from room to room and you'll hear students reciting jingles about parts of speech, see them frantically scribbling basic computations during the "mad minute," and catch little voices reviewing letter sounds. The curriculum is a patchwork of canned curricula, including Shurley Grammar, Saxon Math, Riggs and Spaulding phonics — all with solid track records of success, staff members are quick to note. Also woven into the mix are a couple of other off-the-shelf programs, Direct Instruction and Core Knowledge, both featured in NWREL's 1998 Catalog of School Reform Models. Every minute is put to good use. One recent day, for instance, when the first- and second-graders slouch against the wall as they wait to use the restroom, their teacher drills them on math facts.

Aurora Borealis is, in short, a back-to-basics school with lots of rote learning and repetitive drilling — strategies that make many school reformers cringe. But Susan and Larry believe this is the best approach for their kids.

"Content is important to us," says Larry over a Cobb salad at Charlotte's Restaurant, a favorite Kenai lunch spot that's packed with a boisterous noontime crowd. "Some of the current thinking in education is that the main thing is critical thinking skills, which can be obtained without content. We disagree. I think E.D. Hirsch is right — that there's a core of knowledge we all need, and if you don't know those things, it puts you at a disadvantage in so many situations."

Larry, who logs long hours as Finance Director for the City of Kenai, has carved out time in his schedule to chair the school's Academic Policy Committee, a six- parent board that hires (and fires, if necessary) the principal and ratifies all changes in the school's state-approved charter. A man of 45 whose dark eyes and steady gaze give him an air of quiet authority, he presides calmly over a recent meeting that brings some challenging questions from several parents in attendance. Under discussion is the principal's recommendation that the school begin slowly expanding enrollment to eventually replace the current mixed-age groupings with single-grade classrooms. One of the moms listening to the board's discussion voices concern about the suggested class size increase from 20 to 22 as part of the expansion. She peppers the board with questions.

"Where is the data that shows 22 is a good class size?" asks Pam Johnson, who demonstrates her commitment to her three kids' education each day when she loads them into a van for the 35-mile journey to Aurora Borealis from the outlying community of Sterling. "Twenty-two might be too much for one teacher. Can we get an aide to help the teacher? The increased number could raise problems."

Another woman jumps in to express her own concerns about the influx of new students. Will the new kids be able to keep up? Will they slow the forward momentum of the existing students as they strain to catch up in the demanding curriculum?

The board listens to the women's worries. The two Larrys — Semmens and Principal Nauta — explain the need to bump up class size to ensure adequate funding while allowing for attrition. In an interview after the meeting, Johnson notes that the Kenai district has mandated a class size of 18 for first-graders, a research-based recommendation from the state education department. She knows that small class size is critical, especially in the early grades. She's afraid the board might be starting down a slippery slope of classroom expansion that could be detrimental to learning. "I don't want us to lose the quality that we have," she says.

Johnson, who moved her kids to the charter school because she was disenchanted with regular public schools, shares the same commitment to rigor as the Semmenses and most of the other parents at Aurora Borealis. The teaching strategies at the charter may seem old-fashioned. Yet the school's lofty expectations are right in line with the current nationwide clamor for stiffer standards. And the approach appears to be working, despite a population that leans toward the low middle in income. The school consistently comes in at the head of the pack on standardized tests.

"In 15 of the 18 areas that are tested for state benchmarks, we're the top school in the district," notes Aurora Borealis Principal Larry Nauta, as he forks a gooey slab of black-bottom coconut pie at Charlotte's. Last year, he notes, one seventh-grader scored "99 with an asterisk" on the C.A.T. in math — the highest possible score. And every graduating eighth-grader who wanted admittance to an advanced-placement class got in.

Wrangling over Latin roots

The most immediately obvious evidence of the school's super-tough program is the Latin instruction. Most people associate Latin with religious schools or pricey East Coast prep schools. Yet these students, whom the principal describes as "average kids from average families," get lessons on Latin and Greek every day, starting in kindergarten. They can recite Greek and Latin roots and their meanings as easily as other kids can lip-synch the lyrics to hip-hop hits or sing advertising jingles for sugarcoated cereals.

Each day, Latin teacher Michelle Hinkle makes her rounds, visiting every class for half an hour. One dank morning in midwinter, she takes over the first- and second-grade room where she introduces a new root.

"Brachium means 'arm,'" she tells the students. Eliciting lots of input from the kids, Hinkle explores the root's role in common words, such as "embrace" and "bracelet." She then leads the class in a recitation of the roots they've learned — verbum, graph, tele, metron, tropos, philia, phobos, kinesis, manos, sonus, etc. For each root, the kids make a corresponding gesture (for example, a hand cupped behind one's ear for sonus, meaning "sound"). A couple of kids then volunteer for solo recitations. Mac rattles off the roots perfectly until he hits a snag at prae. Hinkle gives him a hint. "It's a lot like pro," she says. The other kids, squirming and wiggling with the suspense of it all, start hissing out hints of their own. When finally he comes up with "in front of," the class heaves a collective sigh. Clearly, they're happy and relieved at their friend's success. At the lesson's end, the teacher reads to them from Greek mythology.

The next day, Hinkle reviews basic concepts with the class. "What is a derivation?" she asks.

"A word that comes from another word!" Torrey pops off the answer, no sweat.

Using a simple metaphor, Hinkle then reminds the kids of what a "definition" is ("a fence that goes around the meaning"). She then builds upon this image to make the idea of "derivation" ("a stream that comes out of the fence") more visual, and therefore less abstract for the young learners. Next, she introduces the root word dent, meaning "tooth." After giving students several derivations of dent — dentist, dental, dentifrice — she gathers them into a circle at her feet and reads aloud Shel Silverstein's poem, The Crocodile's Toothache, showing them how their just-learned root word, far from being lost in the past, turns up today in children's literature. The kids don't seem at all intimidated by the level of the instruction. In fact, these little guys have been known to wrangle about Latin roots at recess.

In her kindergarten class, Julie Ball weaves the threads of Greek and Latin roots into lessons on science, math, and literature, making connections wherever she finds them. In astronomy, for instance, she reminds her young charges of the Latin words for sun and star, and talks about the Greek myths from which the constellations take their poetic names. Just the other day, she says, the kids were begging to hear again the story of Zeus's son Perseus, who chopped off the head of snake-haired Medusa — a story easily rivaling any Mel Gibson movie for action and gore.

When Ball introduces a new phonogram, the children jump "out of their seats with joy." She hardly believes it herself, but within a couple of days of learning phonograms (combinations of letters that form a distinct sound), something clicks for some of the kids, and they're reading. By November, all but two or three kids out of 20 are reading Arthur books. "They blow me away because I didn't know kindergartners could do this," she marvels.

Ball — whose family runs a local bed and breakfast and leads guided fishing trips down the river — was "very skeptical" when she first saw the Riggs phonics program. The direct-instruction approach didn't seem consistent with current thinking in early childhood education, which stresses discovery learning. Was it developmentally appropriate, she wondered? But she's found that the systematic, repetitive, predictable nature of the instruction "builds confidence" in kids.

"There's not huge amounts of pressure applied to these children," she says. "Whenever I see that I'm pushing some limits, I back up a little. I strive for a balance between challenge and success."

A place to plant our feet

You know you're in Alaska when you switch on the morning news and get a story about infected beavertail making folks sick. Or you swing into a local hangout for a halibut sandwich, and you have to duck under a buffalo head to get to your seat. Or you stop for an espresso, and you catch hair-raising snatches of a conversation about guys fishing for king crab and riding out 60-foot seas and 100-mph winds. Office chitchat revolves around such everyday occurrences as nearly colliding with a moose on your way home from the grocery store or training your hunting dog to point.

Fish and wildlife are a ubiquitous and powerful presence on the Kenai. Maurice Sendak's classic children's story, Where the Wild Things Are, has a special resonance for kids who grow up here where the woods and waters teem with life forms of all kinds — furry, feathered, and finned. The peninsula has a way of grabbing onto people and never letting go.

Gene Palm spent his childhood in Africa, the son of a missionary. But his life changed forever when he ventured to Alaska as a young man to fish. He fell in love with the place and with a fisherman's daughter named Debbie. When their second child came along, they decided to get out of the public school "rat race." So for the next six years, Debbie home schooled their children. Gene fished commercially for herring and halibut and then, after the resource "went south," worked "on the slope" (local lingo for the oil trade) until he got his teaching credential. Now, Gene and Debbie work summers fishing for red salmon. Winters, they're both at the charter school, he as the fifth- and sixth-grade teacher, she as enrollment administrator. One of their kids is a student there, too. "We've found a place to plant our feet," Debbie says.

Gene, like the six other teachers at Aurora Borealis, defends the back-to-basics approach. "How do you teach creativity to kids when they don't have the base?" he asks. "I don't have a single student who's not fluent in basic operations. I can discuss higher-order topics, and they're with me. The payoff is when they get it."

Another teacher, Suzi Phillips, is Alaskan to the bone. Born near Anchorage, she can remember her first visit to the peninsula a quarter-century ago with pure clarity. Kenai was so small and remote then, it didn't have a stoplight. The snow was melting; the ice was breaking up. At high tide, she saw the Kenai River roiling with the shiny backs of beluga whales. That day, she knew she wanted to raise her kids here — in this wild place where her husband's parents had homesteaded.

A one-time pre-med major who switched to teaching, Phillips masterfully handles the seventh- and eighth-graders. She also teaches science and art across grade levels. "We all take on extra roles to fill the gaps in the curriculum," she says. "It's been a killer. We all work really hard." Hanging in the main hallway are examples of a recent art project. The vivid blues and intense yellows of kids' unmistakable renditions of Van Gogh's masterpiece, Starry Night, stop visitors in their tracks. Right next to the artwork is a display of reconstructed rodent skeletons, pieced together with tiny bones picked out of regurgitated owl pellets. The best thing about Aurora Borealis, from Phillips' perspective, is the way curriculum hooks together across grade levels. "The teachers don't hop, skip, and jump around through the curriculum," she says. "The material keeps building and spiraling upward."

"Suzi knows exactly what's been taught all the way back to kindergarten," notes Nauta.

Coming from a previous position in a private school, Phillips was comfortable with the structured curriculum and the high standards, she says. Bill Severson, the third- and fourth-grade teacher, argues, along with Gene Palm, that not only kids but also teachers benefit from a carefully designed curriculum. In the teacher certification program at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, he says, "They taught one day of phonics, downplayed texts, and encouraged you to create your own materials. It was a big hodgepodge. To take a new teacher and expect them to put it all together is just overwhelming. When I went through student teaching, I was pretty ill-prepared."

So he was already leaning toward a more structured approach when he found Aurora Borealis. There he encountered kindred spirits, like Palm, who'd had a strikingly similar encounter with preservice training. "The whole approach," says Palm, "was for teachers to design raw materials. There was no research base."

The real surprise at Aurora Borealis is how much richness and creativity the teachers manage to squeeze in around all the basics. There's a medieval feast and a powwow. There's a "mini-society" where kids raise money for their classroom and learn about running a business at the same time. There's a play wrapping up the Revolutionary War unit when students act out events they've studied. And there are field trips. This year's seventh- and eighth-graders are going to Anchorage to see Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. One year they ventured across the peninsula for a campout in Seward. Another time they designed and dug snow caves for a sleepover in Phillips' yard.

Lori Uponen didn't expect to get an offer when she interviewed at Aurora Borealis to teach first and second grade. "I was honest about wanting to do creative things," she recalls. "I figured I was a little too creative for the school."

To her surprise, she got the job. As it turns out, the strict structure hasn't inhibited her teaching a bit.

"The emphasis is definitely on the curriculum — I have to cover that curriculum," she says. "That's the bottom line. But I can still do a unit on bats and a unit on Egypt. I can still do performing arts and journals."

And she can do music.

"I integrate music into everything," she says with obvious enthusiasm. "We do songs about dinosaurs, about Martin Luther King, about Abe Lincoln. We do rhythmic activities in math and reading. We use music with phonograms and rhyming. I think music is really important for the little guys."

Uponen pinpoints what she believes are the three secrets of the little school's success:

• Teachers who work well together and have the same vision
• Continuity and consistency across grade levels
• High academic expectations for all students

"I think that's what makes good learning happen," she says.

One big, happy family

The buzz around school on a slushy Tuesday in mid-January is Mr. Severson's impending family expansion. First thing in the morning, word leaks out that his wife is expecting a baby — the sixth child for their blended clan. Each new person who hears the newsstudent or staff — squeals or gasps in surprise and delight. Their joy is so heartfelt, you'd think they were anticipating a newborn in their own family. And in a sense, they are. Because everyone at Aurora Borealis says the same thing: It's like one big family here.

At the head of this extended family sits Principal Larry Nauta. The silver-haired 52-year-old came to Aurora Borealis to help the new school through its growing pains. The first board meeting he attended was supercharged with emotion as parents, teachers, and the original principal battled over their educational dreams and ideals. He jokes about it now, but admits that at the time, it didn't seem funny at all.

"It reminded me of some blood-and-guts movie," he quips. "So much for civilization in Alaska." Larry Semmens is glad Phase One is behind them. "The start-up year is difficult," he says. "Besides trying to get your program together, you have to get people to agree about what you're hoping to do. Everything from curriculum to uniforms was a wide-open, free-for-all debate. Often, it was stressful."

When the first principal resigned, Nauta stepped in. A 30-year veteran of school administration with a talent for bringing people together, the district consultant held a steely belief in the curriculum materials he had used successfully as a principal on the peninsula. His expertise, coupled with his easygoing style, personal warmth, and self-deprecating humor, helped to defuse the friction that marked the first year.

Raised and educated in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, Nauta took his master's degree in school administration to Kenai, where he spent the next three decades honing his skills, both in and out of the schoolhouse. The risks he takes are calculated risks, always tempered by practical know-how and deliberation. His firm belief in direct instruction grows in part out of a lifetime of flying in the bush-landing his floatplane on hidden, wilderness lakes and then fishing the wild rivers that run thick with trout and salmon.

"Flight training is all direct instruction — 'I'll show you this; now you do it.' And in my case," he jokes, "they sometimes had to show me multiple times." He scoffs at the idea, for example, that if you simply put kids into a word-rich environment and expose them to literature, they will learn to read.

"If you expose me to a 747, am I gonna learn how to fly it?" he posits. "Sure, some kids will catch on and learn to read. But you've got your 30 percent who won't pick it up. They'll just get frustrated."

Nauta sums up the school's guiding philosophy this way: "It's real easy. Provide the best quality basic education that we can possibly provide for students. That's it — the sum total of it. Pretty straight-forward, huh? When our kids leave here, they do great in high school."

Junior Natalie Semmens bears out that claim. Despite getting excellent grades in her academic subjects, Natalie is nostalgic for Aurora Borealis. "I would go to a charter high school if there was one," says the long-legged girl whose dark hair curls in thick tendrils. "It was more like a family, and nobody talked bad about anybody, ever."

Her younger brother Trent, a serious, confident fifth-grader, tells an anecdote to illustrate his sister's point. "Yesterday," he says, "I saw three seventh- and eighth-grade girls gathering around this little kindergartner, going, 'Oh, the little guy lost two teeth! So cool!'"

Though their goals are very different — Natalie wants to be a fitness trainer and Trent (now an excellent and avid reader) envisions a career as an orthodontist — the siblings agree that the charter school has been a boon for them. As for their little brother, first-grader Travis, who has a dimpled smile that could light up an Alaskan winter, he's eyeing a future as a chef. He could, though, end up a financial guy like his dad. He's already helping older kids with their math, which he finds "real easy."

Whatever he ends up doing, chances are good he'll be a success. Because even more important than a good school is a committed family. Travis, like all the kids at Aurora Borealis, has both. There's no bus service, no lunch program, and a heavy homework load. It's a big job for moms and dads.

"It's a sacrifice to spend an hour on the road and pack lunches and help with homework," Susan Semmens notes.

Adds her husband: "When it's not a choice for people, you don't have the educational buy-in from the parents. This offered us a great alternative to home schooling. It's less effort than home schooling, but at the same time it's not like putting your kids out at the end of the road and a bus picks them up. Parents have to be dedicated."

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