For students who need more structure

Joe Schoenmann and J. Patrick Coolican

Thursday, March 22, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.

CARSON CITY - Gov. Jim Gibbons' attempt to create a military program to turn high school dropouts into drop-ins is gaining support, in one of the first signs of political success during the early months of the new governor's beleaguered tenure.

The prospect of an agreement is all the more surprising given the cost: $14,000 per student and $3.5 million to get the program started, in what is looking increasingly like a difficult budget year.

Nevertheless, both Sens. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas and a strident fiscal conservative, and Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas and a liberal, flew on Saturday with Gibbons to Camp San Luis Obispo, Calif., where they met, firsthand, students in Project Challenge.

Established in 1993, Project Challenge - the National Guard writes it ChalleNGe - was set up as a highly structured six-month military academy, a way to re-create some of the beneficial effects that the Vietnam War draft had on some draftees, said Don Smith, deputy director of Project Challenge in Arizona.

"When your average guy came out of the military, all of a sudden he knows how to groom, get work done, how to be on time - these kinds of things," Smith said. "The idea was that there were a number of people feeling as though they had lost out on some things in the workplace since they'd done away with the draft."

Arizona's program was one of the first 10 in 1993.

Currently, 24 Nevada teens from 16 to 18 years old go into Arizona's program each year. Now, Gibbons wants to build one in Nevada.

The teens aren't forced to go to the camp, and no parent, judge or school can make them. They must volunteer.

Smith said 80 percent of Arizona's program graduates got a job or went back to school. Smith said the program is almost a necessity in a state that trades top ranking with Nevada for having the lowest high school graduation rates in the country every year.

Smith added that the Arizona program costs $3.3 million a year - the same as 14 years ago.

Capt. April Conway, Nevada National Guard public affairs officer, said that of 328 Nevada teens sent to Arizona's program, 209 completed it (64 percent). Of those, 162 (49 percent) earned their general equivalency diplomas.

A former federal prison at Nellis Air Force Base is one of four sites that might be considered for a Nevada program, which Conway said would need to recruit 120 to 140 students per class to make the goal of graduating 100 from each class.

The $14,000 per student price tag is a bit more than the $9,911 tuition for out-of-state students at UNR. For startup costs, $1.7 million would come from state funds and $1.8 million from federal dollars. After that, it's estimated the Nevada program would cost about $2.8 million per year, with the federal government picking up 60 percent.

During his visit to California, Beers talked to some parents who told him the program had "given them back" their son or daughter. Coffin found it a "good, rigid structure for kids who seem to need boundaries."

Jeanie Morrison, a 1998 graduate of Arizona's program, said the program put her on the straight and narrow.

"I was hanging out with bad kids in school, failing all my classes," Morrison, now 27, said. She learned about Project Challenge from a friend and signed up. "It was the hardest six months that I'd ever experienced."

Students are up "before the sun," she said. They exercise and attend classes geared toward helping them obtain GEDs.

Morrison joined Nevada's Air National Guard, where she still works in Reno, a few months after leaving the program. She thinks she might otherwise have ended up "in jail or on welfare," or like many of her high school friends, some of whom are unwed mothers "living in low-income housing, all that type of stuff."

If the governor wants the program in Nevada, however, he might have to muster some strong negotiating skills. Assemblyman Morse Arberry, D-Las Vegas, chairman of the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee, has already asked the governor to find $40 million in budget cuts.

Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said this week that "in a year of tough choices, $3.5 million is a lot of money."