Brothers find last chance could be best chance

By Emily Richmond

Monday, April 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In fall 2006, Eldorado High School freshman Josh Gilbert brought an unloaded gun to campus, stashed deep inside his pants. No one noticed.

Later that day he and his brother Angelo, a sophomore, were called to the office to talk about a fight that had occurred two weeks earlier. Josh told the dean about the gun.

The weapon had been left in their care by an acquaintance, the brothers said. They wanted it out of their house. Somehow bringing the gun to school, to either give it away or dump it, seemed like a plan.

Eldorado’s principal recommended expelling both of them — Josh for carrying the weapon, Angelo for his complicity.

Nancy Gilbert, the boys’ mother, found herself on the phone with everyone from law enforcement to School District officials, “begging people not to give up on my kids.”

They had been good students back in Los Angeles. But with the move to Las Vegas in 2005, things began to change.

There weren’t as many after-school activities available, and they had left behind an extended family network in California. Soon their parents were getting calls from the middle school reporting skipped classes, hallway scuffles and poor performance.

“They bottomed out at Eldorado,” their mother said.

As punishment for the gun incident, the brothers spent several months at Morris Behavior School on East Washington Avenue at North Pecos Road. After that, they could have been sent back to one of the district’s comprehensive high schools, where the cycle might have continued.

But Edward Goldman, associate superintendent of the district’s education services division, found another option.

A few seats were available at Global Community High School, an alternative campus that provides intensive English language immersion for students who are new arrivals to the country.

On the same property as Morris Behavior School, Global Community is tiny, just 200 students. They hail from around world. The school keeps about 20 seats open for native English speakers, to help the newcomers develop their language skills.

There was room for the Gilbert brothers.

Angelo, now a junior, remembers standing in Goldman’s office.

“He told me this was my last time; he wasn’t going to give me no more chances,” Angelo said. “If I messed up, I was on my own.”

The brothers entered a different world at Global Community. Classes were tiny compared with what they’d been used to — 15 kids per room for math, sometimes as few as 10 for English and social studies. Principal Michael Piccininni, who also supervises the Morris behavior program, had time to keep close tabs on every student.

The teachers “are excellent,” Angelo says. “They change the whole way you think about school. It’s more fun than when they gave you a piece of paper and told you to take a quiz. Here, if you don’t know how to do something, the teacher shows you.”

The brothers have made friends among the international students. Josh said hearing about their home countries “makes me want to go everywhere.” Angelo marvels that he has classmates from China.

“I’ve actually got a friend from Nigeria,” Angelo says. “We play soccer.”

Successful programs such as Global Community aren’t cheap. In fact, it’s one of the district’s most expensive ventures. For the 2005-06 academic year, the latest for which figures are available, the school spent more than $24,000 per student, compared with the districtwide average of about $6,500.

And that makes it essentially impossible for the district to duplicate it on any significant scale without a massive increase in funding.

Nancy Gilbert doesn’t like to think about what would have happened to her sons if Goldman hadn’t given them their last chance at Global Community. She knows, however, that Josh and Angelo still have challenges to face.

“Right now, it’s up to them,” Gilbert said. “I can keep loving and supporting them, but I think now they understand the choices are theirs. You have to weigh them when you make them.”

Initially, Josh says, he didn’t realize how big an opportunity he was being given. But after a few weeks at the school, “I buckled down and took advantage of it. Since I’ve been here, it’s been all uphill. Football, lift weights, get good grades. That’s what I’m about now.”

The brothers plan to study accounting in college. That wouldn’t have seemed a likely scenario 18 months ago.

“At first I would have said it was bad luck that we got caught (with the gun),” Angelo says. “Now that I look at it, it’s a lot of good luck. I’m in a much better place.”