Third-grader Alexys Jackson, 8, and her mother, Zinnia Estrada, share a moment with Principal Ana Gallegos during an ice-cream social Friday.

Greg Bryan / Arizona Daily Star

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Ana Gallegos was contentedly finishing her third year as principal of an East Side school when she got an offer both terrifying and intriguing.

She was given the chance to remake a far Southwest Side school that had struggled for so long with such an abysmal record of student achievement that it was forced to undergo a wholesale overhaul under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It remains the only school in the Tucson Unified School District to have that distinction.

Friends told Gallegos she was crazy even to entertain taking the helm of Lawrence Intermediate Elementary School and its roughly 300 students in grades three through five.

There's no master handbook or blueprint for building a successful school from the ground up, let alone one with long-standing problems and a challenging demographic: Ninety-three percent of its students get free or reduced-price lunches because of their families' low incomes.

But, for Gallegos, the possibilities were too much to pass up.

"Creating a school from nothing is very hard to do, but it's also very exciting because principals never have the ability to just pick their own staff and create their own team," she said.

Gallegos was familiar with the school's population, about 60 percent American Indian, having served in previous years as assistant principal at nearby Hohokam Middle School.

"I've heard people say that this is a bad school or that our kids can't learn. There's no truth in that. All children can learn," Gallegos said.

It's a personal quest for her, she said. Originally from Nogales, Ariz., she was the first one in her family to get a college education.

Still, proving the expectations wrong has taken some sacrifice.

Her staff hides the coffee from her, fearful of adding extra energy into what seems like an already boundless source.

She jokes that at 48, she feels 60, adding she's forced to color her hair every month to hide the white that's shown up since her tenure at Lawrence started.

And she's still paying two mortgages, since she moved to be close to Lawrence but hasn't been able to sell her old home on the East Side.

It's all paying off.

In the first year, Lawrence went from a lingering underperforming label to "performing plus" — just two rungs below the top label of excelling.

Gallegos and district officials say they are confident that when the state announces new labels in the coming weeks, Lawrence will have logged enough progress in the last school year to be taken out from under the yoke of federal restructuring altogether.

Test scores for the 2005-2006 school year — before Gallegos took over — showed only 30 percent of fifth-graders met reading and math standards.

Last year's scores on the AIMS (Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards) test show that for fifth grade, 55 percent of the school's students passed math and 59 percent passed reading.

There are smaller measures of success as well.

Though parental involvement at the school was minimal in previous years, last year's welcome-back ice-cream social had so many families that the ice cream ran out.

One-third of the entire student body participates in the new after-school program, which offers enrichment programs that the kids said they wanted, such as Yaqui language, scrapbooking and chess.

Roxanne Begay-James, a 36-year-old project specialist at the school, was assigned to help with literacy there in the year before its restructuring. What she found was defeat.

"The teachers had been beaten up so many times. Students couldn't read or do even basic math. They came to school, but they were just showing up," she said. "They weren't being challenged. It was like nothing was expected of them."

Begay-James, a Navajo, has long been concerned about lagging achievement for Native American students.

"I've always believed our kids can learn as long as you let them know what's expected of them," she said. "And what I'm seeing is that the kids know we expect them to learn. And it's not just the teachers telling them they have to, but it's that they're taking ownership of their own learning, too."

Gallegos' first order of business was to staff the place. Every employee, from the custodians to the teachers, had to reapply for their jobs. No teachers came back, and only four of the classified staff returned.

Then she went about the slow business of building community and expectations.

To encourage student involvement, every student every quarter is required to set a personal goal — not the castle-in-the-clouds kind, but a measurable one. The students write up a plan with specific steps they'll take to help them accomplish that goal. A celebration breakfast and ceremony honors the kids who have mastered it.

Gallegos also built strong ties with the Yaqui community. Tribal officials work closely with the school counselor, to provide support on any intervention or attendance issues. The tribe has also helped financially, providing such supplies as backpacks and eyeglasses.

Grandparent Norma Esquivias, who is married to a tribal member and lives on the reservation, has sent four grandchildren to Lawrence.

She teases Gallegos that the principal needs a pair of tennis shoes, or even Rollerblades.

"She's out at the bus stop, she's out here at community events, she's knocking on doors to meet families. Parents have told me, 'Oh, Lawrence cares now. They even come and knock on your door.' "

Esquivias said she's seen the school ask more of its students. "To be honest, and I speak as a parent, it's incredible what she's done. She's in the classrooms on a daily basis, she holds meetings, she's at parent coffees every month. The word 'workaholic' — that's her."

Her 10-year-old namesake, Norma Inez Esquivias, agreed. "She's a good principal. She takes good care of the school and works over hours."

Norma's 9-year-old sister, Adriana Esquivias, said she is looking forward to the school year. "They teach us good stuff," she said, adding she likes math, but this year she will focus on reading.

Both said their teachers expect them to work hard.

But luring new staff had its sticking points for Gallegos.

"Everyone knew we would be under the microscope, with the state, the district, the community, watching us," the principal said. "I just think, 'What a challenge.' "

Complicating matters is that the school is way, way out there, about 10 miles west of Tucson's airport, so many of the teachers are facing a minimum drive of 30 minutes from home.

Restructuring, however, also came with some perks.

Schools in such dire straits get extra funding to pay for such things as school-improvement coaches and literacy specialists.

They can offer teachers stipends for the additional time that's required of them.

They can lower class sizes — in Lawrence's case, class sizes were capped at 20, down from an average of 29.

If Lawrence moves out of restructuring, Gallegos said, she will lobby to keep some of those improvements, which she estimated as worth $200,000 a year.

"If something is working, it just doesn't make sense to me that you'd take it away when things get better," she said.

Dan Weisz, principal of Johnson Primary, a K-2 school a mile away that feeds students into Lawrence, recalls the buzz that came with the overhaul. His brother even called from out of state saying he'd read in USA Today about a Tucson school going through restructuring.

That added attention, Weisz said, probably contributed to the fact that only three other people even applied for Gallegos' job at Lawrence.

"We all knew that there would be extra things that came with restructuring that you always want as an administrator, but that wasn't enough to attract many people," he said.

Weisz said it's what he doesn't hear from parents at his school that shows him Lawrence is changing. "We no longer hear them saying, 'Where should I send my child to school?' Parents now know that their children can go to Lawrence and get a good education."

Gallegos is a demanding taskmaster with high expectations. She can't afford not to be, even though it meant she lost half her teachers the first year and four last year.

"If you come in and say you've been teaching 15 years and you have all the answers and you're not willing to change what you do, then this is probably not the place for you," she said.

She requires teachers to post lesson plans where she can see them at any time. And she spends as much as 90 percent of her time in the classroom.

Begay-James acknowledged that can be a little intimidating, noting every time Gallegos comes in, she'll ask two things of the children: what they're learning and why. If the students can't answer, then the job isn't getting done.

Last year, for example, Gallegos noticed there was little consistency in the school's approach to literacy. The staff then created a template so that every class spends the same amount of time building background for a story, sitting in whole-group instruction or working in small groups.

The AIMS scores from last year showed fourth-graders gained 14 percentage points in reading, with smaller gains in fifth grade and a small dip in third.

If Gallegos doesn't leave teachers alone to shut the door and teach in isolation, she also doesn't do top-down mandates. There are lots of meetings to develop staff buy-in, which is why the workday for many teachers often consumes 10 hours.

"I knew I couldn't do this alone," Gallegos said. "There's no way as a principal that you can change a whole school if your teachers don't believe that they have ownership."

Now, Gallegos said, the word is getting out. Her first year, she had only three experienced teachers, with the rest fresh out of college. This year, for the first time, teachers called her, and she'll head into the school year with seven experienced teachers on staff. "The good word is spreading," she said.

She hopes to someday get an even better word: Excelling.