Correction (6/17/98): A photo caption Tuesday misidentified sixth-grader Paul Gaines Jr., who was pictured with Gin Kohl, a teaching volunteer at Academy Prep in St. Petersburg. In addition, Academy Prep will begin its 1998-99 school year July 6.

Recess arrives at 10:10 a.m. at Academy Prep, a private school for poor, mostly black fifth- and sixth-graders. The 22 boys stash Latin books in their cubbies and race-walk out to an asphalt basketball court.

Recess used to be chaos, with boys arguing and punching before the first ball was dragged out. But now, no fighting delays the game. The boys debate the occasional foul, but no one storms away, raging. When teachers call them to class, they go.

This year, one mother told a teacher, "You don't need to teach a black boy to play basketball."

But it is recess - more than the sixth-graders' discussion of Shakespeare, or the way the principal yells at them to not talk back, or the six boys who were asked to leave the school - that shows best what Academy Prep has tried to do in its inaugural year, which ended June 3.

Three years ago, the school began as the shared vision of two couples, one white and one black, who wanted to create a free school for boys who live in poverty. The Fortunes are white; Jeff is a retired businessman, Joan is a retired attorney. Bob and Barbara Anders are black, both retired educators.

Last spring, seven months after racial unrest rocked the surrounding neighborhoods, they found the oak-shaded lot at 22nd Avenue S and 23rd Street. With strict academic and discipline standards and individual attention 11 months a year, they hoped to build a place to mold young men who would succeed on their own in high school and college, who might return home to bring other boys along.

It is too soon to say whether Academy Prep will succeed. But its leaders say the changes at recess - the respect that many students now show for themselves, their school and each other - are a good sign.

The parents say their sons are learning. They are better readers, better at math. But first, the mothers talk about the discipline, tougher than the public schools they left, that is changing their sons:

At this school, no homework means automatic detention. Algebra is solved in silence, and a student's question, "Where my soda?" prompts the principal's booming retort: "Where's the verb?"

Rosara McDonald took her son, Vasjah, out of gifted classes at a public school to attend Academy Prep.

"He needs that structure, that order," said McDonald, who supervises a night cleaning crew at a bank. "This whole neighborhood needs that."

Academy Prep is still fighting misconceptions that it is for boys who couldn't hack it in other schools, a boot camp for students with behavioral problems, a dropout prevention program. Or, on the contrary, a place for academic whiz kids.

It is none of those things.

Mostly, the boys at Academy Prep were good or average students at other schools but showed signs of losing interest. Not because they are poor, though that doesn't help, but because they were getting lost in larger classrooms in public schools. Because their mostly single, working parents needed help to ensure the boys make it safely into adolescence, and to counter the bad influences that confront them between school and home.

And because they are boys, learning to become men in a world that doesn't make it easy.

"What it is all about is to get them back on track and let them surpass the things they ran into earlier, so they can get out into the world and really be successful," said Bob Anders.

Twenty-eight boys passed muster in camp last summer, where the small staff at Academy Prep tried to screen out those whom the teachers could not handle. The seven adults, including principal John Effinger, five teachers and an office manager, do not have training to accept boys with severe behavioral or academic problems.

The boys must qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch program, an indicator of poverty. The $8,300 annual tuition is paid for by donations. Most of the boys come from single-parent homes, headed by women, and live near the school. All but two are black.

They defy stereotypes, as hard to classify as any boys at age 11, 12 and 13, who chase each other on dirt bikes, then slow to flirt with a woman twice their age.

Some are extremely smart - sixth-grader Greg Stokes reads on a 12th-grade level - and others, very slow.

Most parents, if not regular visitors, are more supportive than the parents at the elite prep school in Houston that Effinger left to run Academy Prep, he said. Two of the boys' mothers moved them, from Jordan Park and Clearwater, to be closer to school. Another mom, the teachers haven't seen in months.

At Academy Prep, the boys live in a world of work: classes from 7:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. Cleanup time until 3:30 p.m., when the boys sweep and clean bathrooms, a lesson in treating their school as a second home. For boys with any grade below a B, nightly study hall is twice a week.

No homework or talking out of turn earns up to 90 minutes in detention, called "JUG" for "Justice Under God." They wear uniforms, khaki or blue shorts or pants with red, blue or green Academy Prep shirts.

The class work is challenging.

On a recent day, sixth-graders discussed farce in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. They took a geography quiz, with no fill-in- the-blanks, that asked for the ideas at the root of Buddhism, the effects of monsoons on India's climate and the location of Hindu Kush.

When Vasjah McDonald, a sixth-grader, tried to finish the previous night's homework in class, social studies teacher Jose Vasquez tore it up.

"He came home and did it over again. That's the way it's supposed to be," said his mother, Rosara McDonald.

Vasquez, one of three volunteer teachers who worked for room, board and health insurance, attended Nativity Mission School on New York's Lower East Side, the Jesuit school after which Academy Prep is modeled. Last year, he earned an economics degree from Hamilton College in New York.

He is 24, reserved, muscular and no fan of excuses.

When Justin Middlebrooks, 13, didn't bring the notes he needed for the quiz, Vasquez shot back: "That's not my problem."

When Justin protested, it was, "Thirty minutes (in JUG), Middlebrooks."

Vasjah, 12, gave a withering look through long, curly eyelashes when asked by a visitor if he knew how many weeks of school remained.

"You lose track of time here. We've got to keep up with tests, pop quizzes," he said, sighing.

Felicia Lockett worried the schedule would prove too much for her son Marcus. Still, she enrolled him because she felt he was being ignored in larger classes at a public fundamental school.

"Honestly, I thought it would be more than he could handle, with the Latin and the algebra. I said, 'My God, he's just in the sixth grade,' " said Lockett, 38, a customer service representative for GTE.

Marcus' grades, she said, could be better, but that isn't the teachers' fault. More important, the excitement is there. Lockett described mornings when Marcus demanded she drive him to school with rollers in her hair, so he wouldn't be late.

"Next year, Ma, next year's going to be my year," he told her recently.

The high expectations aren't confined to academics.

The boys are not supposed to talk back, or to leave their seats without permission. The most hostile, easily angered boys met with a volunteer counselor twice a week, and attended group sessions to learn how to deal with their anger.

At the end of class, students clear their desks and stand behind their chairs. Not all the boys buy it.

"This is what they call respect," said Eugene Frazier, a sixth- grader, smirking.

Sarcasm won't get a boy kicked out of Academy Prep. That takes misbehaving in ways that keep others from learning, and missing a lot of chances to stop, school leaders say.

This year, three fifth-graders and three sixth-graders were dismissed from the school, more than 20 percent of the 28 original students.

Mary Lane's son, a sixth-grader, was asked not to return after the first grading period ended in mid-September, she said. Lane said she thinks he was dismissed in part because he can act "clownish" and immature in class. Her son returned to public school.

Teachers at Academy Prep had told her he was bright and he was meeting with the school's volunteer counselor to improve his behavior, Lane said. She supports the school but wishes her son had been given more time.

"I feel Academy Prep is a wonderful place, the purpose of it. I do think the youth there have a chance to succeed, provided they have the time and tolerance," Lane said.

Asked generally about the dismissals, Effinger, 51, pointed to boys who are still enrolled, who began the year as "balls of fire" and who still blow up unexpectedly. They are not perfect students, but they have learned to calm down.

JUG, the detention hall, used to be full with boys who had misbehaved. That number is down to one or two a day, he said.

"We can do a lot for our kids within certain parameters. When they go beyond those parameters, that's when we can't help them," he said.

Jeff Fortune, a school founder, said the dismissal rate is low compared to the first year at similar schools, like Boston Prep Center, modeled after Nativity Mission. After Boston Prep's first year, Fortune said, only eight of the original 24 students remained.

"Some kids are just not able to assume responsibility for themselves. I guess that's a sad way to say it, but some of them are already lost," he said.

The boys who remain at Academy Prep receive more than a public school could ever give them.

Classes of no more than 15 students. Teachers like Rosa Hemingway, 63, who explain, over and over, how to solve an algebraic equation, and why they should not say "uh-huh" when they mean "yes." The chance to attend plays and Devil Rays games and museum exhibits.

The time for Marcus Lockett, 12, to ask his science teacher why chewing gum always makes you hungry, and for Justin Middlebrooks to dream big.

Justin's mother, Angelera, took him out of a learning-disabled class in public school because she knew he wasn't.

"Just recently, he told me he wants to be a doctor. Justin never did tell me what he wants to be," she said. "That makes me feel good."

Eventually, the founders want boys and girls in grades five to eight. The goal is to reach 120 students each year.

From the 28 new boys who attend camp this summer, 15 fifth-graders and four sixth-graders will make it into the school. Greg and Marcus and their classmates will become the school's first seventh-graders. New volunteer teachers will arrive, and so will the school's first black male instructor, who will teach science.

The school, which depends on donations from individuals and corporations such as the Times Publishing Co., has raised $1.9- million, Effinger said. But that support must continue for the school to survive. A second building, which will house a library, science and computer labs, should be finished before camp starts July 1. The school will kick off a fund-raising campaign this fall to build an endowment and a third classroom building.

The boys will continue to attend class in the original building, with carpeted rooms painted a watery blue. One will belong to the fifth-graders, who are called "Castor," the name of one twin brother in the Gemini constellation.

The sixth-graders are called "Pollux," after the other twin.

In Greek myth, he was the immortal one.

Academy Prep teacher Jim Cartnick gives sixth-grader Marcus Lockett a boost so he can cut down the ragged netting from a basketball rim in the playground last month. The school ended its first year June 3, and students return to the 11-month program on July 1.

Academy Prep sixth-grader Vasjah McDonald works during class last month. "You lose track of time here. We've got to keep up with tests, pop quizzes," he said.

Gin Kohl, an Academy Prep teaching volunteer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida, soothes sixth-grader Teddy Thompson last month to help him prepare for an English test.

Fifth-grader Jeffrey Shorter, above, cleans the boys' bathroom after classes last month. Each day, the students clean the school for a half-hour after classes. Principal John Effinger, left, helps Teddy Thompson answer a question before an English test. Effinger came to Academy Prep from an elite school in Houston.