As a graduate of High Technology High School, University of California at Berkeley, and a research expert within the field of education, I have been considering my response to the Dec. 31 article "County Career Academies Causing Consternation," by Sherry Conohan regarding "emotional" Leonard G. Schnappauf for the past five months. It is of grave concern to me particularly because I believe that without the vocational districts magnet schools I would not be as successful as I am. It is a tried-and-true standard in the field — meet the needs of your students with what is available. Alternative programs to mainstream schooling produce exceptional humans and scholars.

Personally speaking, I was not considered to be very bright at Shore Regional — according to the prevailing mainstream standards — and I was often penalized for my writing by having teachers at the school suggest to me — while never following through with the threat of penalization — that I plagiarized in my papers, which of course made me confused. How was I to dumb down my writing?

I was relegated to "average" and "remedial" student classrooms, and was regularly told by teachers that when writing, [I] ought to "stick to what [I] know." I was told there was "no way" I could understand geometry the way I did (that is, I knew basic geometry), I must have been cheating, and was placed in remedial math classrooms. Some teachers however, were exceptional, but they were of the prevailing entity.

I fled — and I do not use that term loosely — to High Technology High School where I was treated as a learner. Receiving adequate, rather than substandard, attention I was able to pass my junior year precalculus final after failing the class half the year, with the highest grade in the class, no less. I was unable to keep up most of the year because of the "geometry" class I was in at Shore Regional — where the one thing I can remember is our teacher did not know there were two countries with names that began in the letter "d" and in fact challenged my friend that Djibouti did not, indeed, exist.

At High Tech, I struggled to learn, persevered, and eventually succeeded. I worked with my teachers to set my own goals, and pace. I graduated and went on to school at UC Berkeley as an engineering student, but regained my writing strength and graduated with a degree in postmodern philosophy and fiction, a self-designed major.

The vocational schools taught me I can and would be rewarded for pursuing what I excelled in and enjoyed doing. They taught me to be rewarded for taking a challenge, and what risks I could take. Later these lessons still continued to — and still do today — reward me, as I believe they would anyone who receives support from their community to pursue their dreams.

The present mainstream educational system largely fails to address the skills and independent learning curves of students. Mainstream education labels and pronounces what a student’s will is — special, remedial, honorable — rather than allowing the student to decide their own level of attention, learning, striving, and ability. Students do not necessarily need to be allowed freedom to set their own pace, but there must be a way to nurture learners by working with them, not prescribing to them what or who they are.

I believe since the vocational schools are succeeding in helping bright students achieve their own brilliance — to show off their own abilities — they should be funded by the schools that cannot and have not taken the time to work on how to better serve the community. Vocational schools provide opportunities they cannot find elsewhere.

The issue ought not to be the money; these are tax dollars that equal the same amount the district would receive to support that one student. If the schools do not have that student, what would the money be used for, exactly? If the cost to one school student is lost when that student is lost, that would make sense. You don’t need the money to school the student, someone else is. I thought schools were to provide the best possible education to students. Am I wrong?

Magnet schools provide so many things that the school districts cannot — diversity, achieved desegregation, economic integration, test scores rise, and drop-out rates fall. How are these bad things? Vocational schools have different standards which differ based on what the students are interested in learning.

The most recent edition of Education Week carries an article about the long-term positive effects of free schools, and vocational schools are not free schools at all, but do have similar attitudes. The vocational schools provide discipline to match the interests of the student population, and free schools cater to whatever a student would like to learn or do. This article proves nothing else but that catering to students needs is not a bad thing, and may save a portion of the population that would otherwise be placed in remedial style classes, not learning, or become dropouts.

Before someone makes a statement to say vocational schools remove their best and brightest, someone might want to provide statistics.

If I still resided in the area, I would take the time to beg and plead that Monmouth County Vocational District be allowed to continue with the proper and excellent public education extended to students who, like myself, would not be able to afford the Ranney School (even with its best scholarship being half of the tuition, what low-income family could afford the price?), Christian Brothers, and the Peddie school. Is it not the priority of schools to attend to the needs of their students? Is that sacrificed for reputation? Is it sacrificed for money? Should it be?

I often wonder what would have happened to me had I not taken a leap and applied to High Technology High School. I am also often scared by that outcome when I allow myself the imagination to follow through with a possible result.

When faced with the politics of whether or not to fund a public school that creates lifelong and successful learners, provides a space where students who would otherwise have been dropouts graduate with the tax dollars collected from the families of these learners, one really must face the facts. It’s not money, it’s what you do with what you have.

The bottom line is rerouting tax dollars to public schools where the students spend their days is only fair, equal, just and right. A school has to take the time to think about what its priorities are, and if not helping students is not a school’s highest priority, than the world is a sad one, for certain.

Amy Vecchione is a resident of Portland, Ore., and former resident of Oceanport.