By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

June 27, 2001

SAN LUIS OBISPO -- It's 5 a.m. and the dark, starry sky over Camp San Luis Obispo has yet to peel away.

Dressed in green military fatigues and black combat boots, California National Guard Sgt. Nathaniel C. Ratley is ready to roll.

"Goooooood morning! Get up! Get up! Get up!" Ratley bellows, flipping on a light switch as he marches full throttle down an aisle separating snoozing cadets. "You belong to me for the next two weeks!"

The first day of camp and the first day of reckoning arrived loudly Tuesday for 195 blurry-eyed preteens enrolled in the Oakland Military Institute, the state's first charter military school.

For the next 10 days, as at most summer camps, they will hike, swim and kayak near this Central Coast tourist and college town. But as at a boot camp, they also will march in formation, wear uniforms, knock down push-ups and be rattled out of bed before the sun peeks over the nearby mountains.

They are guinea pigs in an educational experiment that has raised the ire and eyebrows of critics and the hopes of politicos to lift the image, if not the test scores, of Oakland's troubled 54,000-student school district.

Out of the controversy, though, grew interest from officials in other California cities, such as San Jose, Fresno and Riverside, said Capt. Bill Goins, OMI's assistant commandant.

OMI is a new face in a traditional school system that will test the intellectual mettle of seventh-graders during its inaugural year in portable classrooms on the Oakland Army Base.

At nearly 11 hours, school days will be arduous and jammed with instruction. Students will be quizzed, drilled and expected to perform for a prolonged academic year of 200 days.

"This is a more serious program than they're used to," said Col. Greg Allen, OMI commandant. "The whole goal is seeing that they succeed in life."

For Joseph Padilla, 12, of Oakland and his new classmates, the road to academic achievement runs through this historic military training center. And on Tuesday, they hit the road early.

"It was bad," Padilla said, describing Ratley's thundering wake up call as he laced up his shoes. "It was like I only slept a few minutes."

With the sun burning off the night and a trio of platoon sergeants itching to get moving, students flooded from their two-story dormitories in a less-than orderly fashion.

They were corralled into groups -- two all boys, one just girls -- then split into smaller troops before marching about a mile for scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, cereal, juice and milk.

"The food's good," said Bill Lewis Jr., 12, of Oakland, as he waited outside the mess hall for his fellow cadets. "The only thing I don't like is the wake-up calls."

It was an exercise in discipline and, in some cases, near exhaustion for cadets. For Ratley, it was a morning mission of maintaining patience.

"You have got to get out of your minds that you are in charge," Ratley hollered at his young, mostly black charges after they continued falling beyond the arm-length separation he had ordered. "You are not in charge."

For most of the day, platoon sergeants ran their cadets through routines of personal maintenance -- how to make a bed, keep a foot locker, clean their rooms properly -- and other orientation.

Uniforms will be issued within days.

While critics have focused on the program's military leanings, school officials, many of whom are California National Guard members, continued to tout its intense educational goals. This is a college preparatory institution, multiple military personnel regularly pointed out during a camp visit, and the students will be prepared.

"These kids will not be trained to be soldiers," said Col. Floyd Davis, director of youth programs for the California National Guard. "My goal is to get these kids to college."

The inaugural year begins Aug. 13 with 162 students expected to make up the first seventh-grade class. About 30, some of whom are on a waiting list, will be trimmed through "attrition" from the roster compiled at the start of camp, said Jerry Martin, OMI's chief of staff for support.

Seventh-graders will be added each year until about 1,000 students make up the school's grades seven through 12.

There will be seven full-time instructors. Platoon sergeants, acting as counselors, will stay with the same group throughout its OMI career.

Officials used a lottery to determine who would join the school. Academic accomplishments were not considered.

"Our goal is to look at the total student," said Rick Moniz, a Chabot College history instructor and OMI's academic director. "(But) at the end of the school year, we will be successful academically."

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who lost battles over the school with his city's school board and the county Board of Education before the State Board of Education approved it, said OMI is a model.

"I think it is a major milestone getting them down there and completing this part of an opportunity," Brown said from Los Angeles. "This has the real potential to transform these kids."