John Beale, Post-Gazette photos Angela Fowler, who will graduate from The Neighborhood Academy in Garfield on Thursday, works on a project for Spanish class. Click photo for larger image.

It's shortly before noon at The Neighborhood Academy, a plucky little faith-based prep school in Garfield that aims to turn around the lives of struggling urban youth.

Amid a thicket of secondhand books and worn chairs, a quartet of teenage girls -- the entire senior class -- hunkers down in the quiet school library. Each is chipping away at her senior project -- a 15-page paper on the transformations, both personal and public, that lift individuals from one place in life to another.

The project is part of a senior seminar that bridges religions, writing and history. Its teacher, the kindly voiced John Fetterman, is an Episcopal priest coaxed out of retirement to become a part-time instructor at this school of 60 students and nine full-time teachers.

The class has been navigating the lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. -- an odyssey of how their public and private transformations forever changed America's social landscape.

But any theme of personal evolution is nothing new for the teenagers.

That's because for the past four years, Candycia Thompson, Angela Fowler, Jana'a Washington and Catherine Moore have been rewriting their own stories, changing their own spirits.

They've been doing it in part at the academy, an inner-city private school for eighth- through 12th-graders at 5231 Penn Ave.

The school, which sprouted from a 1989 summer program called the Larimer Avenue Youth Club, was founded by the Rev. Thomas Johnson and Jodie Moore, both graduates of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Dolly Mason, left, works with Candycia Thompson, a Neighborhood Academy graduating senior, at the East End Community Thrift Store in Garfield. Click photo for larger image.

Through having small classes and requiring tougher study habits, college visits, mandatory summer school and counseling for students and parents, the academy hopes to rescue public school students felled by low expectations and generational poverty.

So far, it takes roughly $1.5 million a year to run the school, which survives on funding from faith groups and foundations. Tuition is charted on a sliding-fee scale based on income, but families are asked to pay at least $50 a month......

The economic and cultural challenges can be severe: One student had never ridden an elevator, which is what many students use to get to the school, housed on the second floor of the old-brick Champions laundry.

Johnson, once a teacher at Shady Side Academy, describes what they're doing as "building the ship while sailing it."

Come Thursday, the girls will become the first class to graduate from the school.

Its first four graduates all leave with honors. Candycia will be the first in her immediate family to graduate from high school. For three graduates, they are the first in the family to head to college.

In their days and nights together, the four have become a small, close sorority in blue, white, gray and khaki, the colors of the school's dress code.

	Neighborhood Academy seniors, from left, Jana'a Washington, Candycia Thompson, Catherine Moore, and Angela Fowler work with teacher Frank McNutt in art class at the Garfield school. Click photo for larger image.

The seniors work together -- a part-time evening shift at Mellon Bank where they process checks. They volunteer together at a Garfield thrift store. One sunny May morning, they each come to school, their hair all in thick cornrows, their feet all shod in black tennis shoes. Their days are punctuated by giggling, whispering and dabbing on foundation -- Mary Kay in bronze and chocolate.

Together, they've surrendered to the academy's 12-hour days and an extended school year, which clocks in at 220 days. It's an important submission, because school officials believe the students, many of whom enter deficient in reading and math, can't succeed here unless they're willing to do the hard work to catch up and then move forward.

All four seniors have had the odds stacked against them.

They have survived poverty, homes with drug and alcohol abuse or domestic violence; some know what it's like to live with someone other than a parent.

But now, they will part to head off to college -- Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Westminster College, LaRoche College and Oral Roberts University.

Each has a fresh start and a self-determination nourished by their journey through Spanish, English, religious studies, other academics and daily 8 a.m. worship.

It was not easy to get here. To find the new, they had to shed the old.

Resilience

Three years ago, Candycia Thompson, now 19, was a struggling student who lay beside her dying mom and promised her, "I'm gonna become something. I won't let you down."

Neighborhood Academy student Angela Fowler works with Shirley Gleditsch, senior manager of the East End Community Thrift store in Garfield. Click photo for larger image.

Thompson, who now lives in Highland Park, had been going to school in Wilkinsburg where her grades were, if not rock bottom, close to it. For a few months, her aunt and guardian, Katherine Brown, now a volunteer at the school, tried home-schooling the sophomore, but that did not work.

Her aunt took her to an open house at The Neighborhood Academy, and Thompson told officials she'd repeat the 10th grade to get herself up to muster.

Stepping back a grade, being teased as "dumb" and finishing the long school days were a sacrifice, but Thompson had faced worse. For much of her life she cared for her mom, who suffered from a fungus that was infecting her brain, and watched over four younger nieces. "I've never been a child," she said.

The academy has given her a second start and poised her to graduate from high school, something none of her five brothers or sisters had been able to do.

Thompson wants to be a research physician and seek a cure for mucormycosis, the condition with which her mom struggled. She is planning to attend Westminster.

Transcendence

Something happened to Angela Fowler at the end of her sophomore year at the academy.

From a distance, she looked at her friends -- many were having babies, not working or dropping out of school -- and she wanted something different.

Suddenly, the school she had tried so hard to get kicked out of didn't look so bad.

Fowler, now 17, was a low-achieving student at Brashear when she started going to The Neighborhood Academy. Her dad had her change schools.

She hated it. The long hours and discipline stressed her out; she was the girl who just wanted to have fun.

One of nine children in a blended family, today she lives with her father in Wilkinsburg. She travels every morning about five miles on the Frankstown bus to get to school, but her shift in attitude is light years from where she started.

As a junior, "I was happy to come back to school," she said. "I came back with a different attitude. I was thinking if I didn't study, I would not be anything, and I wanted to do something with my life."

At her old school, no teachers ever told her she'd succeed. Nobody told her about the SAT college entrance exam. "I wasn't prepared for tomorrow."

Four years later, what she once thought a curse became a blessing.

"I never thought I'd like to be in school; now I want to get up -- to see friends, to do class work and finish my papers."

This fall, she'll begin studies at LaRoche, where she's considering majoring in elementary education.

Belief

Then, there's quiet Catherine Moore, now 18, who held onto hope for a school where everybody would know her name.

She'd tried two different public schools, both outside her Homewood neighborhood: one was too unruly, the other too big.

In early 2004, her parents found a flier for The Neighborhood Academy in their church, East Liberty Presbyterian.

Soon she was enrolled.

It was an answer to a prayer. The Academy was her path to "excel beyond what is expected."

Each day, she feels her spirit is growing, a result of the close friendships, the volunteering that teaches her to help "even if you're not getting anything from it" and the teachers who "give you encouraging words even though they don't teach you anymore.''

She will get on the Greyhound bus in August and ride to Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. She'll major in English, hoping to become a journalist.

Ability

All her life, Jana'a Washington dreamed of a special school. A place both challenging and caring. A place where she could shine.

It took her a while to realize that this fledging school was it.

Washington started ninth grade at the academy and left after several weeks to attend Peabody High School. After three months there, she boomeranged back to the academy's small classrooms, where there are about six students for every teacher.

She loves English, but said her lessons at the public school were drowned out by classroom disruptions.

"I had a goal. I wanted to go to college, and I didn't see myself making it in that school."

Also, for Washington, now 18, leaving Peabody meant a chance to escape the peer pressure, which has pricked her most of her life.

Though she now lives with a grandmother in Highland Park, she spent her early years with her mother and five brothers and sisters in a Garfield housing project.

She was teased for not always having the right clothes or tennis shoes.

But the depressing culture that showed youths the streets, early pregnancy and low academics haunted the girl who hungered for a brighter way.

"I realize some kids don't ever get a chance to do something different," said Washington. "I chose to come back here."

At the academy, the honor student is showing her best self. She's student government president and has won a governor's scholarship to attend Edinboro University of Pennsylvania to major in psychology.

Washington has been teased for going to a school that people have never heard of and wanting to do better with her life. Her response: "It's not lame to want to learn, it's lame because you're stuck in the street."