For four years, a Bend-La Pine Schools program called Students to Reach Individual Visions of Excellence provided an alternative education for students who had been expelled or wanted a more intimate learning environment.

But the district shut down the program, known as STRIVE, after the 2017-18 school year, citing more nontraditional schooling options for the majority of its students (including a revamped Marshall High and new magnet schools Realms and Skyline), and plans to serve a dwindling population of expelled students. Now, expelled students have a different slate of choices to continue their schooling.

“We took STRIVE, and a lot of the programming and needs that it met are going to be met at some of our new high school options,” Deputy Superintendent Jay Mathisen said.

According to Mathisen and STRIVE’s founder and former leader, Sal Cassaro, a major reason for shuttering STRIVE was there were fewer and fewer expelled students attending every year.

Mathisen said STRIVE would have only three to eight expelled high school students at any given time out of the program’s overall group of about 70. For the students simply there for an alternative educational experience, STRIVE was becoming overcrowded in its small space at the district’s administrative building, said Cassaro.

“We outgrew what we could’ve done,” said Cassaro, who is now Marshall’s principal. “We did an awesome job … but at the end of the day, we were two hallways. Students deserve more than that.”

Cassaro said a handful of STRIVE’s students went back to the district’s four large, comprehensive high schools, some attended Skyline and Realms, and about 35 to 40 students landed at the new Marshall High.

However, students who have been expelled cannot attend any of the three new high school options or the four comprehensive high schools, Mathisen said. The district realized it needed to provide more options than simply the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, which was previously the only non-STRIVE option for expelled students.

Expelled students in middle school still have STRIVE in the administration building, but expelled high schoolers have different options. The first is the intergovernmental council, which has worked with Bend-La Pine for about 20 years to help expelled students earn credits or even high school diplomas.

Josh Lagalo, the organization’s youth employment and training manager, said he’s seen the number of expelled students at COIC increase by 15-20 percent this year after STRIVE’s closure.

There’s also Luna, which launched last year. Luna is a late-afternoon, four-days-a-week program in the Bend-La Pine administrative building that expelled students can join, although that was not the original intent, Mathisen said.

Finally, expelled students will have a third option in the spring: a small, still-unnamed program next to Marshall which will combine both face-to-face instruction along with online curriculum. Attendees would receive individualized attention from their teachers in scaled-down classrooms.

“Sometimes what those students need, socially, is to feel they’re not under the scrutiny of a large classroom setting,” Mathisen said.

Although Mathisen described the future program as being on the Marshall campus, Cassaro clarified that the mini-school would be housed in portable classrooms on the Heart of Oregon Corps’ campus, right behind Marshall. The principal said Marshall and the new program would have no connection.

“We cannot mix expulsion with what we’re trying to reinvent at MHS,” he said. “MHS doesn’t have a great reputation, and we’re trying to replace that.”

Cassaro said the plan at the new program is to quickly rehabilitate expelled kids.

“The primary vision is going to be, let’s get you out for the shortest time possible, and get you back to one of the comprehensives or a school of your choice,” he said.

The new program should have few students — since the start of the decade, Bend-La Pine’s number of expulsions plummeted from 108 in the 2010-11 school year to 30 last year, according to district data.

Mathisen said STRIVE was a major component of keeping kids from reaching that point.

“STRIVE was meant to be a short-term, skill-building, ‘Let’s help you get back on track, give you some attention, give you some trust and love and get you back to your school’ (program), and Sal did that really well with his team,” he said.

And expelled students, no matter which program they choose, will have the opportunity to land on their feet again. Mathisen said being expelled doesn’t mean being “banned forever,” and if students perform well in their expulsion work, they will eventually be able to return to their local high school or school of choice.

—Reporter: 541-617-7854;jhogan@bendbulletin.com