The Principal’s Office

Had Mr. Santana fled, teachers and parents would not have been surprised. Instead, he went shopping. He returned with delicate curtains, a white couch, silver lamps and a slate water fountain, transforming his office into something that looks like a hotel lobby in Miami Beach.

“I’m a closet home decorator,” he explained.

Staff members, especially those who had watched the school shut and reopened with new leadership and a new name twice in the 1990s — only to fail again — had other thoughts.

“I thought he was nuts,” said Letitia Laberee, 54, the school’s coordinator for English as a second language. “I thought, he’s just another one. Three years, he’s gone.”

Mr. Santana is still around, but the school is not the same. Last year, 59 percent of its seventh graders passed the state math test — below the 81 percent who passed citywide, but enough of an improvement to help the school earn an A on its report card. Suspensions have plummeted and attendance has improved, though problems persist: Ninety-five of the school’s 253 eighth graders did not graduate this month (summer school may save many).

But these days, sixth-grade boys with good behavior are rewarded with lunch in Mr. Santana’s office, where they talk about “guy things,” as one of them put it, “like wrestling.”

“We’ve got to earn this,” said Elijah Dawson, 13. “He’s got couches, he’s got a computer, he’s got where we can put our food. This could be a beach house.”

Students call 391 a “Lean on Me” school, referring to the movie based on Joe Clark, the principal who tamed an unruly school in Paterson, N.J., with a baseball bat and a bullhorn. And like Mr. Clark, Mr. Santana has run into problems. In April 2009, he was removed from the school for several weeks, after allegations that he had failed to properly report an off-campus sexual assault involving two students. The investigation remains open, the most serious of three pending complaints against him.

Instead of bullhorns, Mr. Santana gets students’ attention by snapping his fingers and calling, “Mira!” (Spanish for “Look!”). At 43, he is a cufflink-wearing natural comedian with a tough streak and a toolbox including what many would call frills: those office curtains; flat-screen televisions in the hallways that show student-made videos; piles of magazines in the cafeteria; barbecues; ring day ceremonies.

And, this year, the most glamorous, most eagerly anticipated and most well-attended eighth-grade prom in memory.

Some educators oppose such celebrations of middle school milestones, arguing that perks like a prom can be incentives to finish high school; others chafe at the idea of 13-year-olds in high heels and glittering gowns with plunging necklines. But Mr. Santana, who lived the childhood of his students — growing up in a tenement near the school, with a father who was in prison and a mother who spent time on welfare — takes the opposite tack.

“I’m hoping that this prom serves as a way for them to say, ‘I want to feel this again when I graduate from high school,’ ” Mr. Santana said.

Likening himself to a mother sea turtle and the students to eggs laid on the beach, he added: “We know that not all of them are going to make it into the ocean. We pray, please, let this be 100 percent that will leave us and come back four years from now. But we just know that there’s a real world out there that’s not going to have them all succeed.

“If this is the last prom that they’re going to go to, I want it to be the most memorable one that they have.”

TWO hours before she was supposed to be accepting an honor on behalf of the school at a ceremony held by a theater group one day this month, a girl walked into Mr. Santana’s office, sheepishly holding up a wrinkled mess of a white shirt. She had planned to wear it to the ceremony, but it got crumpled in her backpack. Horrified, Mr. Santana whisked the shirt over to Mama’s.