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Education grads are helping troubled, at-risk children to succeed in school and in life.

Brittany," a 16-year-old student at Portland's Rosemont School, has led a tortured life that on countless occasions could have ended in tragedy. By her own admission, she says, "I died and came back to life twice."

Living on the streets as an intravenous drug user since she was 10 years old, Brittany attempted suicide several times, including jumping off the Morrison Bridge while reeling from the effects of heroin and LSD. She eventually ended up in the psychiatric unit of Emanuel Hospital.

Brittany fits neatly within the student profile of Rosemont, not just because of the low lows in her life, but also because of the dramatic turnaround. In the 11 months since she's been at Rosemont, Brittany, who hadn't been in school since fifth grade, is testing at a 10th-grade level in math and is on track to be the first one in her family in four generations to graduate from high school.

Rosemont is one of nine sites and three transitional classrooms in Portland Public Schools' DART (Day and Residential Treatment) program. DART schools are scattered throughout the city and include some within regular public schools. They are for kids who are wards of the state because they have committed crimes, or have been taken from abusive households, or have extreme drug and alcohol problems. Some students stay in the program for as briefly as a few days; others are in for as long as a year. It all depends on how long it takes for their caseworkers to confidently move them to a more mainstream school setting. The average stay is six months.

The kids are "troubled or in trouble," says Rose Bond '71, MS '76, who has been the supervising principal of the program for the past 15 years.

Some of the schools allow DART students to blend in with the normal middle school or high school population. Others, such as Rosemont, are lockdown facilities where students are under 24-hour supervision. What they all have in common in recent years is a steep rise in test scores—the result of new, innovative teaching techniques that are helping kids who have rarely succeeded in school to excel.

The teaching techniques and a big share of the credit for the rising test scores are the product of former Portland State students who make up three-quarters of the DART program teaching staff. Some of them have simply attended classes at PSU. Others have graduated or earned advanced degrees through the Graduate School of Education. Together they make up the dominant force that is transforming the lives of young people who otherwise might have continued on a permanent downward spiral.

A case in point is Dawn Jackson, a program chair at Rosemont. The daughter of two artists, Jackson came to Portland from the Southwest to attend Reed College. She later transferred to PSU, where she earned a master's degree in special education in 1998. After working in the mental health field and at another special school, Jackson came to Rosemont and quickly realized that traditional teaching methods were inadequate to help this uniquely troubled set of students. Drawing on a combination of her own talents and instincts, as well as staying on top of the latest research, Jackson discovered that art was an answer.

Not just using art in the teaching of art classes, but using artÑincluding both visual art, creative writing and dance—to teach subjects as concrete as science and math.

One reason why this approach is so effective, Jackson says, is that art helps young people make connections with the subject matter in a very personal way.

In biology class, for example, Rosemont students are learning about the workings of cells by dancing as a group. As they move their bodies to and fro and around each other, they learn about concepts such as osmosis, the process by which cells absorb chemical elements, and mitosis, the process a cell goes through when it divides. Creating visual and moving images helps concepts stick in these young minds, Jackson explains. It also helps students understand what happens to their bodies when they take drugs.

In a recent math project, students painted big watercolor faces that showed how they felt about math. Along with the faces, they created graphs charting the individual "variables" of their lives, such as their drug abuse, and indicated in what direction they wanted those variables to go. From this exercise, students learned about graphs and variables in an intensely personal way, at the same time forming strategies to improve their personal lives.

"Everything they're learning they are relating to their physical and mental life," says Jackson.

Since she introduced the arts program at Rosemont during the 2000-2001 school year, the other DART schools have adopted it, and it has become a cornerstone in the entire DART program's success.

"Our kids, who have failed and failed and failed, can, when given the right tools, blow people out of the water," Jackson says, adding that in many cases the DART schools perform better than conventional Portland high schools in their ability to produce students with high test scores.

For example, only 7 percent of Rosemont students were passing at the pretest level of standardized writing tests at the beginning of the last school year. By the final test, 93 percent of the students met or exceeded state standards for 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders. In math, 11 percent were passing at the pretest level, but 87 percent met or exceeded the state standards after the final test.

Test score improvements were just as impressive at DART's Breakthrough School, the educational component of the Morrison Treatment Center. The number of students last year meeting or exceeding state standards skyrocketed 270 percent for writing and more than 800 percent for math. The two schools—Rosemont and Breakthrough—showed the biggest improvements; DART administrators are looking at how they can accomplish such high levels of success throughout the rest of the program.

The most dramatic results have come in the last year, but DART educators have been working for the last three years to revolutionize the program. One impetus for that change is the federal No Child Left Behind program, according to DART principal Bond. No Child Left Behind is controversial, she says, because of the standardization it imposes on schools throughout the country. But it forced DART to take a fresh look at its students and teaching methods.

The faculty are on the front lines to make sure the DART successes continue. Not surprisingly, it takes a special person to be a DART teacher.

"They need to have the ability to develop rapport with kids who have had pretty poor experiences with adults. They also have to have a belief—a really strong belief—that these kids can learn and succeed," Bond says.

Not all the teachers enter the DART program fresh from a master's degree. Many of the faculty got their start as child care workers and worked their way up the ladder, getting master's degrees and special education licenses from PSU along the way.

Shawn Croteau received his master's in special education from PSU last year, and teaches math at Breakthrough School. He started working with kids about eight years ago, first in summer camps and then at a treatment center for children who had behavioral problems. He also worked in mainstream education for a while—as an assistant at Lake Oswego Junior High—but decided that special education is his niche.

"These kids have had a lot of negatives in their lives, so I give them plenty of praise and encouragement," he says. His methods have to be inventive, since many of his students can't even navigate a text book. So he concentrates on teaching problem-solving strategies and instilling the attitude that it's okay to be wrong. "You have to have wrong answers every day in order to learn," he says.

Taking what was wrong in their past experiences and learning how to set things right is what it's all about for DART students. Back at Rosemont, "Jennifer," 17, is the first one in her family to graduate from high school, and is now preparing to go to college. Not bad for someone who was in foster care since she was two, was sexually abused, and was in and out of public schools. With DART she found success.