Josh Lewis has a perpetually full voice-mail box and a pile of files on the passenger seat of the blue Mitsubishi pickup truck he calls his office.

“I’ve got a little camp up at the high school,” he said while on a walk-and-coffee outing at Saint Paul Harbor.

“This morning I met with two sisters, their mother, an aunt and a grandpa.”

Lewis’ business card says “director.” He runs Shorelines, a new alternative high school being launched by the Kodiak Island Borough School District. Meetings with families are part of the job.

So are walks at the harbor and downtown where he looks for potential students. In the midst of a casual conversation about halibut quotas or this year’s huge return of pink salmon, he’s likely to inquire about the brother, niece or employee of the person he’s chatting with.

Lewis recounted a story about walking out of the Kodiak McDonald’s one day and spotting a young woman who he knew had left school.

She was having the tires changed on her car — a captive audience for his pitch. Lewis strode across the street.

“What are we doing here?” he said, leading into his offer. “I’m starting an alternative school here. Would you like to look at maybe finishing up?’”

Many of Lewis’ potential marks are young adults who think work or family obligations keep them out of school.

“They’ve been on their own for a couple of years now and they can’t fit a job, life and regular classes at Kodiak High School together.”

His contacts — both for recruiting and to help build the program — include the Harbormaster Office, a local housing authority, juvenile justice workers, employers and job center and welfare workers.

Lewis tries to figure out how every potential student can fit into Shorelines.

The school has enrolled more than 20 students so far, though official figures won’t be reported until October, when enrollment statistics for all schools are due.

Some of the students still attend regular classes at Kodiak High School, some don’t. Some have jobs and will earn credit for work experience.

One is a student at St. Herman Seminary, the Orthodox school with dormitories on Mission Road. Some are attracted to Shorelines’ promise of independent study. Others see it as their only chance for a diploma.

Eighteen-year-old Janice Alexanderoff was introduced to Shorelines by Mindy Pruitt, service coordinator at Kodiak Island Housing Authority.

Some Shoreline classes are taught at Woodland’s family investment center, where cooking classes, parenting workshops and personal finance classes were part of the mix before Lewis approached the housing authority for help with Shorelines.

Pruitt, known as “Miss Mindy” to kids at Woodland Manor, is so deeply involved in Shorelines that Alexanderoff refers to her as a teacher.

Alexanderoff wants her own apartment, but has no diploma and no GED. She was out of school two months into her senior year.

Alexanderoff said she was disciplined so often at KHS, she decided to drop out. She clashed with teachers. Worse yet, when she cut class, her friends would follow.

The social pressure led to regrets. Alexanderoff lost friends when their parents forbade them from hanging out with her.

Finding out she wasn’t prepared to pass the GED tests or find a good-paying job is another regret.

“Nobody’s going to give me a good job. What am I going to do for money?” Alexanderoff said.

Pruitt said housing authority workers learned from experience that when a tenant can’t pay the rent, just paying it for them isn’t likely to get them on a path to self-sufficiency. Her agency has a financial interest in their tenant’s personal success.

“You know it. My coworkers want her to pay the rent. But I want her to able to pay the rent and someday move into her own house,” Pruitt said.

Shorelines is not the first alternative high school in Kodiak. It’s predecessors include a program called the areawide school that was discarded a few years ago, at least two programs run under a school-within-a-school model, a GED program at Kodiak College and the Learning Center, a correspondence school which still exists.

Lewis is marshalling resources from the Learning Center and from the college to create Shorelines.

He’s not sure why the college campus has rooms available to him at the last minute, but it’s fortunate for Shorelines. It’s particularly lucky this year, when district officials call their budget “programmatically flat,” meaning no new programs will be added.

Lewis credits Superintendent Betty Walters with giving him the freedom to create a program, knowing it will need to attract money in the future.

“I think Betty is just putting a lot of faith in me,” Lewis said.

He told a quick story about one of his students borrowing a laptop computer from an existing program to use for a keyboarding class. The next week, the student’s sister was asking about Shorelines. She wanted a laptop, too, and wanted to change her high school curriculum to get one.

“I want this to be a program of attraction,” he said.

The old areawide school was run by Dave Allen, now a vocational education teacher at the high school teaching wood technology, cabinetmaking and construction.

“In Spring of 2000 or 2001 we really found out that the areawide school was going to be left unfunded,” Allen said.

Allen doesn’t blame anyone in Kodiak for cutting the program, and says he isn’t privy to school funding decisions.

“I only can conclude that the Republican program of no school left standing was in place,” he said.

The district, Allen said, was scrambling to meet accountability requirements mandated by the federal government.

“The grant collapsed, or was no longer in there, and I know that the district was reeling,” he said.

“It’s a bummer that the alternative program was diminished, and I’m really glad that Josh (Lewis) is putting something back together for some really neat students,” Allen said.

Walters said the district has always kept close watch on students at risk of dropping out or who already have dropped out.

“We left no kid without an optional or alternative program,” Walters said, adding that programs such as the Learning Center could, and still can, take in those students.

The difference this year is mostly Lewis. He plans to marshal Learning Center resources, Kodiak College resources and Kodak High School resources to create what he called “a basket of courses” meant to “wrap the program” around students needs.

Students do not enter Shoreline in the ninth grade, as they would in some alternative or independent study programs.

Shorelines, Walters said, “is for kids that don’t necessarily access some of these other programs, sometimes based on a need to work, sometimes based on some restrictions that their families have on them.”

Roman Rice, a student at Saint Herman Seminary, wants a diploma because he doesn’t believe the GED he has already earned will help him further his education.

Rice is 22, so he has to apply directly to the school board for permission to attend Shorelines.

“I made some mistakes, and now I have to pay for them by doing some things I don’t want to do,” Rice said.

Rice said he dropped out because he was having more fun drinking and smoking pot with friends than attending school.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Kodiak has a pretty severe alcohol problem,” he said.

There’s also no enforcement of Alaska’s truancy laws here, sources at the at the State of Alaska Division of Juvenile Justice said.

That’s where Rice’s mom works. Even so, Rice said it was two weeks before anyone knew he had dropped out. Naturally, his mom was upset. That alone made for one of the worst emotional experiences of Rice’s young life.

“You make these dumb moves, and you don’t realize it until after you’ve made them,” he said.

Rice is headed for an academic life. He studies Greek at the seminary and is self-taught in Hebrew.

He calls linguistics a healthy obsession. He’s got notebooks of the Hebrew alphabet from when he practiced transcribing. He’s read a Hebrew dictionary back to front.

The challenge for Lewis won’t be inspiring Rice’s intellect. It will be to fit a handful of high school credits into a schedule that already includes nine hours of seminary classes a day, and duties from ringing bells at church services to teaching Bible classes to kids.

If there ever was a student who didn’t need a high school diploma, he might be it.

But Rice is not convinced.

“Ever since I got my GED, I’ve been thinking ‘That isn’t good enough,’” he said.

He wants to be a father someday. If that happens, he’d like to be able to tell his kids he earned a diploma, even though he’d once turned his back on school.

“I’d like to be able to tell them, if they were failing or if they just wanted to quit, that I was like that also. I just want to be able to tell them that I went back, and that I finished.”

Mirror writer Scott Christiansen can be reached via e-mail at schristiansen@kodiakdailymirror.com.