RON CLARK'S CHALKBOARD JUNGLE TNT CAPTURES TEACHER'S LIFE IN INNER CITY.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Staff Writer

It's possible that no one is more excited about the upcoming first day of school than Ron Clark.

The 2000 winner of America's Teacher of the Year award, and the subject of ``The Ron Clark Story,'' premiering Sunday on TNT, may be even more excited if he looks out across his fifth-grade classroom and sees kids who look bored, frustrated, lost, chip-on-the-shoulder angry or all of the above.

These are the students he hand-picked to be among the first 120 enrolled in the Ron Clark Academy, a new private middle school in Atlanta the 34-year-old teacher likes to call an ``education laboratory.'' These are the types of kids who can benefit most from his strict yet loving 55 rules, the doctrine he has used to turn laggards into leaders in standardized test results and other measures.

``The Ron Clark Story,'' starring Matthew Perry, depicts the 1999 school year, when Clark moved from rural North Carolina to New York City with the intention of making his mark on hardened inner-city students. He jumped into a sixth-grade class of dropouts in the making, where peer pressure centered on refusing to do the work, excelling in crime and creatively dissing the teacher.

Often, subjects of made-for-TV movies say their stories have been embellished by the screenwriters to heighten the drama, but not Clark.

``Some days I would wake up and think, `I don't want to go,' '' he said of his first year teaching in Harlem. ``My mom would call me and she would say, `Ron, there's a position for you here if you want to come back.' And I'd be lying if I told you I didn't consider it, because it was hard. ... Actually, in the movie it's even kind of sugar-coated.

``But the one reason I never left was because I was not going to let those kids down,'' he says. ``They had had five or six teachers the year before. I mean, teachers staying a month, quit, a few weeks, quit. These kids had abandonment issues, and I didn't want to be just another person to leave them.''

He kept plugging away, building their self-esteem, challenging them to process what their textbooks were teaching them, and imparting life lessons that brought civility to the unruly classroom. His teaching style is full of gimmicks and surprises, and they seem to work, judging from the rapid rise in test scores among his students.

There are a few details in the movie that Clark disputes, such as the scene in which he compels his students to be quiet during his grammar lesson by vowing to chug cartons of chocolate milk at intervals as long as they pay attention.

``They made it look like I drank 30 cartons of milk and it was, like, 14,'' he said.

He also complained about a small scene in which Perry instructs the kids to dispose of their chewing gum by spitting into a clear jar.

``I teach my kids that if you have gum in your mouth, you go, you get a napkin, you place the gum in the napkin and you dispose of the napkin discretely,'' he said. ``That is so far from anything I ever would have done. I just cringed. I hate the thought that teachers around the country are going to see that and go, `I should get a gum jar.' ''

Clark really did let his students teach him how to double-dutch jump rope to build rapport, he really composed a ``presidential rap,'' and he really did videotape four hours of lessons a day at his apartment for two weeks while recovering from pneumonia.

Those unconventional techniques are only the beginning of what students can expect at the Ron Clark Academy, which is housed in an abandoned factory in a neighborhood populated by prostitutes and drug dealers. He purchased the property with proceeds from his best-selling book of rules, ``The Essential 55,'' and he's amassing the operating funds -- $14,000 per student per year -- from corporate and private donations.

The program involves hands-on learning, from its student-run coffee shop and its ``courthouse'' to a recording studio.

``(The students) order all the products, they order the merchandise,'' he said. ``The students are our custodians, they run our cafeteria.

``And all the curriculum - all the math, the science, the history - it's all integrated with travel. By the time they're eighth graders, they will have visited six of the seven continents.

``It's going to change these kids' lives. We work with kids from low-income areas, kids who aren't achieving their potential, kids whose teachers recommend them to us because they see these kids as potential dropouts. We're going to take these kids, lift them up, use my Essential 55 Rules - plus, plus, plus, however many it gets to - and we're going to give them the most amazing education.''

``And I'm telling you, with this school, we are going to make a global change in education. We're going to change the way teachers teach, the way kids interact with teachers -- we're going to change the whole system. I don't know in what ways, exactly. But I know we're going to add so much to the way we reach kids and the way we lift them up and get them to love learning.''

More information about the school, which counts Perry among its board members, is available at www.ronclarkacademy.com.

Valerie Kuklenski, [phone]

valerie.kuklenski(at)dailynews.com

THE RON CLARK STORY

Starring: Matthew Perry, Ernie Hudson, Melissa De Sousa, Hannah Hodson, Brandon Mychal Smith.

When: 8 p.m. Sunday.

Where: TNT.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Teacher Ron Clark with student Tamara Lauriano, left, and actress Hannah Hodson. The story of the award-winning teacher of inner-city students airs 8 p.m. Sunday on TNT.