Illustration by Jason Raish
Always the question. Always a second’s hesitation. If only you could say Parkway, Ladue, Burroughs, De Smet, MICDS…any of 15 or so “right answers.” Kids who go to an alternative high school have to spend way too much time explaining their answer—and watching people’s faces register a slight social shock, a wary curiosity, or, more recently, maybe even an enlightened “How cool!” Finally, people are realizing that the main stream is pretty narrow; why navigate boulders and rapids if you don’t have to?
David Young, founder and president of The Sound Room, is both a graduate (class of ’75) and longtime board member of Logos School, located in Olivette. He explains the place as “real college prep. You learn to think. People accept you for who you are instead of trying to put you into some kind of mold.” Creative, argumentative, impatient with authority figures whose puffed-up pronouncements struck him as absurd, Young was more rebel than misfit. But he knew he needed an alternative high school, someplace that would use his energy instead of frustrating it.
He chose Logos himself, and when he arrived, he wasn’t the least bothered by his new mix of classmates, some of whom “didn’t fit in” for far graver reasons.
“Some were seriously mentally ill,” he says. “That’s no different from public school. It was just that here, they had an environment that could deal with them. In public school, they didn’t. A lot of kids that had trouble in public school didn’t make it out alive.”
Vanessa Lawson (class of ’87) is a manager in the banking industry, modifying loans to help people who are trying to save their houses. “I’ve got 90 things in my head at all times, and I don’t stop thinking until I know it’s right,” she says.
When she was 13, they called that “obsessiveness” and “hyperactivity.” But then, everything was a problem when she was 13.
Vanessa moved with her family to St. Louis that year. “A lot of things had gone on in Louisville that my parents were not aware of,” she says. “My neighbor was abusing me, had been for years. When something like that happens, you are at odds; you’re not like other kids. You never reach out.”
She was just starting to feel comfortable at school…when her dad got the big promotion and a transfer. She went from a familiar, tightknit city neighborhood in Kentucky, to a coolly remote West County suburb of St. Louis. “All of a sudden, nothing is right,” she says.
Vanessa started mouthing off, skipping school, partying hard, sneaking out to meet boys. “My parents are thinking it’s classic adolescence,” she says, “and I’m a house on fire.”
She remembers the questionnaires: “‘Are you suffering from depression? Does it run in your family?’ Run? It gallops,” she says wryly. Finally, a hospital social worker suggested Logos, a school for troubled teens in grades 7 through 12. She walked in and saw sloppy-looking kids sitting cross-legged in the hall, looking antisocial but engrossed in grown-up literature. “These are the burnouts, not the socs [social types],” she realized with a certain awe. Causes mattered less than their consequences.
“Low self-esteem is a killer like nothing else,” Lawson says. “I’d never been told that I was smart. I was a C, D, and F student, hadn’t gotten an A since first grade. Suddenly I realized I was able to have conversations with people about literature. Logos let us in on secrets you don’t get until college.
“We never give kids that moment of self-insight; we never say, ‘Well, why do you think you’re doing it?’ Logos gave me that on the first day.”
Started by a brilliant rebel, Logos prided itself on its lack of rules; it exploded structure and lavished freedom on every student. Today, it’s solidly accredited, tightly structured, and focused on getting kids successfully back into the mainstream. The student body’s changed, the culture’s changed. But the secret’s the same.
Structure or chaos, psychiatric diagnoses or drugs and delinquency—what makes the difference is what’s stayed constant: individual attention. Logos has one teacher for every six students. And when you include the 15 licensed therapists, Logos has one adult for every three students—with mandatory therapy sessions every week.
About 90 percent of Logos graduates go on to postsecondary education or college. Soon, their only dilemma is what to say when someone asks the question.
Kathleen Boyd-Fenger, who’s now executive director and principal of her alma mater, answered “Webster High” through her twenties, though she spent only her freshman year there. “Only in my thirties was I loud and proud,” she admits.
“I came to Logos when I was 15,” she says, telling a story she doesn’t automatically divulge at school. “I’d had a pretty tumultuous childhood. My mom was diagnosed with bipolar depression and sporadically treated, and she self-medicated with alcohol. She’d been married six times. I’d go back and forth between her and my father, who was schizophrenic but very medicated.”
In adulthood, after years of being terrified she’d start showing symptoms and wondering whether she dared have kids herself, she found out he wasn’t her biological father after all: She says her mother had slept with a married lawyer. Kathy had to smile; as a freshman at Webster High, she’d made up a perfect home life—with a dad who was a lawyer.
Grade school was her sanctuary—she was a straight-A student, but by the time she started high school, she was inconsolably sad, barely eating or sleeping. Recognizing depression, a friend’s parents suggested Logos. Scared and scornful, she let her guard drop after a few weeks. “I fit,” she says. “Before, I couldn’t have kids come and spend the night, because what if my mom wasn’t OK? In public school, everything was stigma. There wasn’t any stigma at Logos.”
She soared, finishing high school in 2 1/2 years and winning a scholarship to Saint Louis University. Later, Logos’ president begged her to come back and teach; now she’s the principal. Every year, she stands in the hallway and reads the relief in the new students’ faces: “Oh, this is cool: I fit in ’cause I don’t fit in.”
Mike Cusumano (class of ’05) had two loving parents, a steady home life, good grades. But he kept getting in trouble. “Even in kindergarten, my teacher said, ‘Sometimes Michael isn’t doing what I want him to be doing,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know what the rules are!’”
Adolescence magnified his social awkwardness. His parents withdrew him from Clayton High School to avoid his getting expelled, and he went to Logos as a last resort.
“My first impression was ‘I shouldn’t be here,’” he says. “But I got assigned a therapist… At first, I was pretty dramatic. I’d threaten suicide over the smallest thing. I didn’t know how to deal with being upset. Other kids had the same feelings I did, but they just managed them better.”
The therapist helped immensely. “The main thing was just him listening—it kind of lightened the situation.” Cusumano made good friends at Logos. After graduation, he earned a 4.0 in prepharmacy at Mizzou.
“At Logos, I learned how to behave in the world without causing problems for myself,” he says simply. “Before, I wasn’t able to fit in. At Clayton, they just had their stuff together too much for me. I didn’t get it, and everyone else did. They understood exactly what you are supposed to achieve in high school and how you are supposed to behave.”
Is he sure? Maybe they were just faking it?
“Well, I think functioning to some degree is a matter of faking it,” he says, grinning. Then he pauses, trying to articulate how Logos changed him. “I’m a lot more comfortable with myself now. Before, I kind of walked around looking like I felt like I was going to throw up.”
What advice would he give a kid who felt like that now? “We don’t live in tribes,” he says instantly. “We live in a world with over 6 billion people. You can get rejected by a million girls and made fun of by a million jocks, and it’s not even a drop in the bucket.”
So what does he say when people ask the question? “Oh, I still say Clayton.
“I once saw this silly little diagram of how you talk to people: superficial stuff until you know them better, then there’s a bridge, then you go deep,” he adds. “I always wanted to start with the deep stuff right away. Bringing up Logos is like that; it’s asking someone to be serious too early in the conversation.”
Not everybody’s capable of that.
Jeannette Cooperman is SLM’s staff writer.
