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iranda Seals likes her new high school so much she shows up even when she doesn’t have to.

“I came to school today because I like being here,” Seals, a 15-year-old freshman, said on a Wednesday afternoon just before the holidays, lounging at a table at City High School. She was supposed to have the afternoon off, because her “City Works” class was going to Flandrau Planetarium in the evening, but she came in to help out at the office instead.

“I love it!” she said. “The teachers and principals are really welcoming. They’re structured but they’re friendly about it. And I like the environment.”

That environment is Tucson’s downtown. Located in the old Cele Petersen building on Pennington, City High puts on emphasis on “place-based learning” that treats the community like a textbook. Every Wednesday afternoon the students go out into the world on City Works projects of their choice. Students who pick an art component might visit a gallery or studio; others pore through the archives at the Fox Tucson movie theatre. Seals selected a science City Works.

“We’re helping to develop the new UA Science Center for Rio Nuevo,” she says confidently. “We do surveys and research, and put our own ideas in.”

City High’s real-world curriculum, along with regular classes, has drawn some 85 ninth and tenth graders from all over the city in its first year, says principal Carrie Brennan, who expects those numbers to grow gradually to a total school population of 240, 60 per grade. The far-flung students, hailing from public schools and charter schools, live everywhere from Armory Park to the Foothills.

Seals, a Tucson Unified School District resident, hails from the city’s Southwest side. She and her friend, Abriel Thomas, 14, carpool to their charter school each day, their mothers taking turns driving the girls. Freshman Emily Moe comes all the way from Marana, driven in the morning by her mother, a nursing student, and picked up in the afternoon by her father, a mechanic at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. An art student who’s helping make a book about Tucson artists in her City Works class, Moe makes the long trip in from the outer suburbs each day because she hated her local public high school.

“It was too big,” she said. “I like being downtown. It’s more liberal here.”

City High principal Brennan, who taught for 11 years at Catalina Foothills High School, said that downtown is a major attraction for her new school.

“The students are out doing field work as much as possible,” she said. “They go to the library. They went to the Tucson Museum of Art on the very first day of school. They go to the UA. We’re excited to be here.”

City High School is not alone. The throngs of students streaming into its doors every morning are just part of a big population of school kids coming by bus or car to schools right in the heart of downtown. City is one of five high schools within a few blocks of each other, each offering small classes and a specialty program. Several reach out to troubled kids, another tailors its programs to Mexican-Americans, and still another, like City, specializes in the arts and the resources of downtown.

The four-year-old Pima County Vocational School, on Congress Street, is a charter that caters to 17- to 21-year-olds who are returning to school after dropping out. Its 50 students do daily two-hour apprenticeships in downtown businesses as part of their school day.

“They’ll tell you, `I messed up,’” said director Gloria Proo. “This is a high poverty group. But they’re highly motivated. They want to succeed in school and work.”

TUSD’s Downtown Alternative High School, on North Sixth Avenue just west of the Ronstadt Transit Center, has 84 students who have been suspended or threatened with expulsion from their regular TUSD public high schools.

Chicanos por La Causa runs Calli Ollin Academy, a charter located for the last five years at Stone and Alameda. Some 125 students, from 9th to 12th grade, study a curriculum, in English, that focuses on Chicano studies. The school’s goal, assistant principal Elizabeth Tridico says, is “helping Chicano students succeed.”

Meta Academy High School opened its doors this fall at Fifth and Broadway, an outgrowth of the 7-year-old Tucson Academy of Leadership and Arts, a kindergarten-through- eighth grade charter in the same location. Meta’s 20 students, mostly ninth graders, come for the arts-intensive curriculum, and “personalized, rigorous classes,” principal Alan Rumsey said. He expects eventually to enroll a maximum of 200 students.

Tucson’s first lasting school was downtown – the appropriately named Congress Street School was founded on Congress in 1872. Four traditional TUSD public elementaries have run for years in the neighborhoods ringing the city’s commercial center: Davis Bilingual in El Presidio, Drachman and Carrillo in Barrio Historico and Safford in Armory Park. But the big cluster of high schools in the neighborhood is a relatively new phenomenon. One of the attractions of the location obviously is the easy transportation via SunTran to the bus hub at Ronstadt Transit Center. Still, some parents are uneasy about the location.

“My mom is a little bit anxious about downtown,” said Seals, the City High freshman. “She doesn’t like me walking around by myself.” But with Seals declaring that she likes school “more than I ever did before,” her mother is making peace with the urban site. Students clearly benefit from downtown’s cultural resources and training opportunities. The schools already serve downtown families and the kids of downtown workers, and they may be important in luring new residents to the city center.

“We attract students from all over the city,” said Theresa DiPietro, principal of the Tucson Academy of Arts and Leadership, which enrolls 150 kids from kindergarten through eighth grade. “A number of our parents work downtown.”

David Hoyt Johnson, who works at the Tucson Pima Arts Council downtown and lives in El Presidio, loved having his daughter Mariam, now an eighth grader, go to a local elementary, Davis Bilingual.

“We really liked Davis,” he said. “It’s a real community-oriented school. We live within a couple blocks of the school. It was great for us. I dropped her off at school and then came in to work. We wanted something close to home.”

No one’s complaining about the little kids, but some merchants already upset about teens hanging out at the transit center are dismayed by the sudden influx of adolescents. An informal tally puts the number of teens going to high school downtown at about 364.

“We haven’t a received a whole lot of complaints about the schools downtown,” said Michael Guymon, chief of staff to Council Member Fred Ronstadt, whose Sixth Ward includes downtown. “But some merchants are upset.”

Margo Susco has run her specialty clothing shop, Hydra, at the corner of Sixth and Congress for a decade. She’s just a stone’s throw from the TUSD Alternative High, the public school that tries to turn around kids with discipline problems.

“I’ve had problems with their kids,” she said.

The charters are a few short blocks away from her store. She praises City High as the very model of what a charter should be, but she’s bothered that charters are not required to let merchants know when a new school is opening in their midst.
“All of a sudden there are two, three, four, five charter schools in a two-block radius,” she said. “I’ve been here 10 years. I’m a taxpaying businesswoman, and I wasn’t even informed. When someone applies for a liquor license, there are steps you go through. I’m informed. With charter schools you’re not informed.”

Permitted by changes in state law in the late ’90s, charters receive public funds to the tune of some $5,000 a year per student. Like public school students, their students attend free of charge. But the schools are run by independent organizations, and are free from many of the strictures governing the regular public schools. That means they can do things like dream up the City Works classes, or count apprenticeships as part of the school day.

“The whole idea of charter schools is wonderful,” Susco said. “I have no problem giving them an open environment. But as a businesswoman I have other concerns…They’re going to have to take a hard look at the process. How many charters can we have downtown?”

The influx of adolescents has not particularly helped her business. To deal with the crowds of kids, she’s had to institute a rule banning big groups: no more than two teens to come into the store together at a time.

Some downtown boosters are also concerned about zoning rules that don’t allow new bars or liquor stores to open within 300 feet of a school. If the schools continue to proliferate, critics worry, they might undermine Congress Street’s evolving status as an arts and entertainment district. A movement is afoot to exempt downtown from such zoning.

Council Member Ronstadt is “interested in creating an exception downtown,” an entertainment zone where bars would be exempt from the 300-foot liquor law, Guymon said. That means a bar or package store could open right next to a school, but there would a “quid pro quo” in exchange for the looser rules. The city would get an authority it doesn’t have now to scrutinize liquor businesses, or even to rule that a district had too many bars.

Some businesses are benefiting by the influx of young customers. Russ Gillespie has run Dizzy G’s luncheonette for 20 years on Pennington – now right up the street from City High. He’s providing the school with 50 lunches two days a week. And he’s become part of the nutrition curriculum. He gave a talk over at the school, and then the kids came over to tour his restaurant.

“The schools are a good thing for downtown,” he said. “All activity downtown is good. People drop their kids off and pick them up. They may come back downtown later.”

And if kids act up sometimes on the sidewalks at the end of the school day, he takes it in stride.

“Some kids get in trouble,” he says philosophically. “They’re our kids. If they get in trouble we need to look out for them.”

Several of the charter school operators said they’re sensitive to business owners’ concerns. Lots of kids are on the loose in the afternoons, blowing off steam as they head down to the Ronstadt Transit Center. But the bus center also gets some of the 2800 students who attend Tucson Magnet High, not far from downtown, and the charters worry that their kids are getting lumped in with them.

“A group of the charter school principals met with the security committee of the Tucson Downtown Alliance,” said City High principal Brennan. “We’re eager to work with the city and the business owners. We understand that people are concerned about teenagers downtown. But any vibrant downtown needs a range of ages.”

Proo, director of the Pima County Vocational School, said the whole point of her school is to get young adults into the workforce.

“We want downtown businesses to understand what we do,” she said. “The students come and go by the buses at Ronstadt but they’re not hanging out there. They have to be at school at 8:30 a.m.”

They even help local businesses. After attending morning high school classes, the 50 students at the downtown site (the vocational school has two other locations) head out for job apprenticeships at downtown businesses in the afternoon. They work in the hotel industry – “The Clarion Hotel is a big one” – in retail stores, and in clerical and computers in offices, and in public works for the county.

“The places where they’ve been have been very welcoming,” Proo said.

Social studies teacher David Parslow said it’s amazing how rapidly the students respond not only to the structure but to teachers and bosses who believe in them.

“This is interesting stuff,” he said. “We’re taking kids from where they are and in three months they’re different people.”

Mark Levkowitz, owner of the Chicago Music Store up the street on Congress, has benefited from the program.

“We’ve had interns working for free from the vocational school,” he said. “They’ve been great.”

Levkowitz takes a middle-road position on downtown’s status as a new educational capital.

“I would prefer to see more retail than charter schools. But that said, I’m glad the buildings are occupied. The high school students are potential customers of mine, and they have parents with money to spend.”

Guymon, Ronstadt’s aide, believes that downtown revitalization will balance out what seems like a disproportionate number of teens on the streets.

“Right now, to some, the kids seem like a big burden.” But with new residents moving into The Post, for example, a mixed-used residential building on Congress, the proportion of kids will shrink. “Youth will be a lesser element.”

Proo agrees that downtown should welcome everybody.

“We need to have different kinds of people reflective of the larger community, old, young and middle-aged, businesspeople, workers and students. It can be very rich if we all contribute to establishing downtown as a viable place.”