Tough turf: one school's gang war.

Joining a gang is just a rite of passage for a lot of young people in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood. In the gangs, they find belonging, respect, and purpose. Hanging out and protecting the neighborhood turf are the bonding rituals these street families employ to hold their membership together.

Just about everybody in Back of the Yards' Holy Cross-Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish has friends or family in the Saints, the neighborhood gang, but only a small percentage of kids are hard-core gang bangers. Actual membership means little to rival gang members, however, who may prey on anyone when they venture into the parish looking for rivals to beat down--or worse.

Back of the Yards doesn't have its own public high school. That means just getting to school in a different South Side neighborhood represents a treacherous crossing of gang boundaries each day, while fights between rival gangs are frequent disruptions once young people from the Yard do make it to school.

Michael Pintor, 17, has run with the Saints since childhood. His membership in the gang, however much it adds to his prestige on his home turf, got him nothing but trouble in high school where he and students from rival gangs engaged in daily hallway confrontations. Just surviving his high school years would have been a challenge for a kid like Pintor; actually learning anything and graduating seemed a complete fantasy. He called it quits after stints in two different schools. Too many fights, he explains. "Too many other gangs."

But a unique program, the Irene Dugan Alternative High School, is letting Pintor stay within his own gang turf by bringing the high school to him. Now he can concentrate on classwork, not on hallway survival training. "I know everybody here; I know all the teachers," he says. "No more fights," he adds with a smile.

You'll find the tiny Dugan school within a warren of intersecting alleys behind Holy Cross Church. The 30 students waiting for the doors to open each morning can testify to a lot of what is wrong with public education in America's cities. They've dropped out of any number of different schools and GED programs, which is not to say that their failure to thrive in "normal" schools can be laid completely at the door of the Chicago public school system. As they'll admit, it was often their own bad choices that led to problems with school. Others were too time pressed by jobs or family obligations to make it through high school, some even to make it there at all.

Holy Cross' pastor Father Bruce Wellems, C.M.F. calls them his "St. Jude League," after the patron of impossible causes: Holy Cross kids who have dropped out--or been forced out--of every high school they've attended. But he's not writing off his St. Jude kids as hopeless cases--Wellems says he never gives up on them--just that he's decided that some problems seem intractable, short of divine intervention.

Of course, even divine intervention can use a helping hand. That's why in 1998, Wellems helped found Dugan, offering these young people a second chance, for many a last chance, at getting a high school diploma. It's no accident that the alternative school was located within the Holy Cross Parish compound. Dugan is a Chicago public school, but the Holy Cross community--its parents and business and church leadership--have assumed a direct responsibility for supporting the young people and seeing that they get their diplomas.

Most of Dugan's students are first-generation Americans, children of Mexican immigrants whose cultural and linguistic ties to the U.S. remain tenuous. They live literally between two worlds, the Mexico left behind and the American dream their families are struggling to embrace, often moving back and forth between jobs and schools in both countries.

In most Back of the Yards homes, both parents work, sometimes more than a few jobs, trying to make ends meet. Their immigrant parents may never learn to adequately negotiate life in this new urban world. Back of the Yards kids are left to fend for themselves among the various influences they encounter, good and bad, including the gang lifestyle that swirls around them in this neighborhood that has provided generations of big shoulders for Chicago industry.

David Gonzalez is typical of the young people getting another chance at an education because of Dugan and its student-oriented strategies. At 20, Gonzalez should have already graduated from high school. Unfortunately his education was frequently interrupted by lengthy stays with family in Mexico. Gonzalez lost years here and there during his primary schooling and found himself, at 16, barely a grammar school graduate and never a high school student.

He had a series of temporary jobs--home remodeling, packing crates in a factory--and began to understand that he could look forward to a lifetime of such dead-end work if he didn't get a better education.

Gonzalez wanted to go back to school, but he didn't want to deal with the gang tensions and rituals that can turn a typical day in a Chicago high school into mortal hazard. How a student dresses, what neighborhood he comes from, even an unconsciously angled baseball cap can get a student in a whole world of trouble with gang members, even, as is usually the case, when they don't happen to be gang members themselves.

"It's hard," Gonzalez says. "You've got to worry about your shoelaces--how they look, how thick they are--what clothes you wear, what colors your clothes are, if you got Five Star Connies on, how you tilt your hat." Gonzalez throws up his hands in frustration. If he had to go through that every day, he says, "I'd probably drop out."

As many South Side Chicago high school students do. More than 70 percent of the kids in Back of the Yards will not complete high school. But Gonzalez's sister told him about Dugan, and now two years later he is on the verge of graduation and thinking about pursuing an associate's degree at a Chicago city college.

Martha Aguilar and formal education parted company after eighth grade. Now 18, she has been earning a paycheck since she was 14. "I saw my parents struggling. I wanted to help out. I was the only one who could," she says, explaining that her brothers and sisters were too young. "But I always wanted to go to school."

After years away from the classroom, Aguilar found her first days at Dugan last year pretty scary. But she has done well and is preparing to graduate in June. She plans to go to college or into the Army reserve, better options than the factory work she's accepted in the past.

The idea for Dugan grew out of a monthly reflection and support gathering of gang kids from Holy Cross directed by Wellems. In 1996, he introduced the group to his spiritual advisor, the late Cenacle Sister Irene Dugan, a professor from the Institute of Pastoral Studies, Loyola University, who began sharing her insight and wisdom with the boys. (They later insisted on naming the school after this mentor.)

Many of the boys in what became known as the "Reflections" group were high school dropouts trying to find some way to continue their education. Dugan passed away in August 1997, but the group continued to meet. After local educators began joining the sessions, it wasn't long before the idea of an alternative education program for Holy Cross kids began to be kicked around.

The proposal was approved by the Chicago Board of Education during a time when its reform agenda included a willingness to try new educational strategies and a deadly surge in gang violence in the neighborhood--33 teens and children in the 9th police district that includes Holy Cross were killed in 1998--indicated that something dramatic had to be done. "What we were trying to do was to take away all the excuses [for academic failure]," says Wellems.

Edward Garcia, 20, doesn't blame the gangs or family problems for the troubles he had in high school. "I was flunking, so I just stopped going," he explains.

"I dropped out of Kennedy High School and then got kicked out of night school ... My grades weren't so good," he adds sheepishly. "I was working, and I was tired, and I missed a lot of classes."

It's hard to imagine Garcia doing that poorly in school when this obviously bright young man tells you about his interest in art and music, how he hopes to pursue those interests in college or else open a small business to market an invention he's been working on, or do all of the above. "I'm the kind of person who likes to be doing a lot of different things," he says. One thing he won't be doing is describing his invention to strangers. At a seminar for inventors and entrepreneurs he attended "they told us never to talk about your invention with anyone."

But before this budding entrepreneur could get his official start, he knew he had to get a high school diploma. Dugan offered a great alternative for him. "It's a small school, and you know everybody here because you're from the 'hood. And it's a good environment."

"There's so much attention from the teachers here," Desiray Santoyo, 20, says, trying to explain why she is succeeding this time around after other false starts. The school has five full-time and two part-time teachers, allowing them to provide nearly individual attention to students.

"You find out that the things you thought were so hard, you are able to learn them. Like, `Wow, I had it in me all along.' You just need someone to show you.

"I couldn't go back to a regular school," says Santoyo. "I was so far behind. I kind of gave up. I wasn't really caring what tomorrow would bring." The fact that near riots were breaking out between the African American and Mexican students at her high school didn't exactly improve her school spirit either.

Santoyo says "getting jumped" by girl gang members in the neighborhood where her high school was located was a regular exercise. "My dad told me: `I'll talk to the principal.' He didn't get it. You can't talk to the principal about this kind of thing. The principal can't do anything. Those girls didn't even go to our school, they were just from the neighborhood.

"Then my mother passed away," Santoyo says. "I lost a lot of hope then.

"What got me thinking about going back to school was raising my own little boy. He's eight months old. How could I tell him to go to School and work hard if I didn't do it myself?." Going to Dugan gives her a "chance to do something with my life."

"I've learned to believe in myself again," she says. "I got my hope back." Santoyo will graduate in June.

For Wellems keeping the church "at the heart of this" has been key to the success of Dugan. But keeping the church focused on its responsibility to all of its children has been a struggle in its own right.

"The Catholic Church has closed three parishes in Back of the Yards," leaving Holy Cross as virtually the only social institution at work in the community, says Wellems. "I brought [Chicago Cardinal Francis George] here, and I told him, `I want you to see a neighborhood that the church has abandoned.'" George has since become a strong supporter of Holy Cross' outreach programs.

"These kids are our kids," says Wellems. "The Latino culture has taught me that we are family, and family takes care of family."

Do programs like Dugan really make a difference? It's hard to say. Thirty-seven students have graduated from the school so far. Of the 20 young men who have made it through Dugan, two have ended up in jail. Wellems is convinced those other 18 could easily have wound up dead or in prison if not for Dugan.

Wellems hopes to expand the program in the near future. Only time will tell how well the Dugan grads do as they move on to college or careers, but by at least one unfortunate measure, the school has achieved some success. Last year Wellems only had to say one funeral Mass for a child from Holy Cross who was killed in gang violence. In 1998, the year before Dugan opened, he buried six.

"I'd much rather spend my energy building a school than planning a funeral Mass," he says.

KEVIN CLARKE is managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.