TEXAS CITY — Rodolfo Gonzalez, an 18-year-old ninth-grader, is tired of school.

The Texas City High School student is bored. His classes are noisy, and his teachers are always too busy to help him.

Tired of traditional classroom instruction and anxious to graduate already, Gonzalez enrolled in a new program at his high school for at-risk students such as teenage moms or dropouts or students who have been held back a few grades.

In the program, students work at their own pace on computers whenever they have free time.

“It’s easier,” Gonzalez said.

The program is part of a national movement toward tailoring education to individual students’ varying needs, said teacher Randa Gilbert.

For years, public school teachers taught class in one of two ways: they either arranged students in rows and made them all work on the same assignment at once, or they divided them into groups based on their skill levels.

“We divided them into something like the blue birds and the buzzards,” Gilbert said. “Kids are young, but they know who the bluebirds are and who the buzzards are.”

In Gilbert’s classroom, students come and go as they please and they are allotted as much time as they need to finish their assignments.

“We should have doing this from the beginning,” Gilbert said. “As a good teacher, you conform to the needs of your students. That’s your job.”

Of the 171 students who enrolled in the program, called REACH (Raising Educational Achievement), 26 moved up a grade and 80 graduated. In some cases, students who had already dropped out returned to high school to earn diplomas.

Gabby Letroise is one of those dropouts. Letroise married just before her senior year and moved to Galveston, where her husband worked. She had five credits to earn to graduate, but she didn’t like Ball High School and stopped going.

It bugged her that she didn’t have a high school diploma, so when Gilbert called her up and told her about the program, Letroise jumped at the opportunity, she said.

“That’s what I needed, that push right there,” she said.

Letroise comes in early and spends all day in front of a computer in the otherwise empty Texas City High School. Sometimes, she phones Gilbert to tell her she wants to come in earlier than the school is supposed to open.

So far this summer, Letroise has earned 4.5 credits, the equivalent of taking art, government, economics and two English courses. Once she finishes a senior math class, Letroise will earn a diploma. She plans to become a dental assistant.

“Ms. Gilbert has encouraged me and let me know I can do it,” she said.

Supervising teenagers with a variety of problems is much different from teaching in a regular classroom, Gilbert said.

She never leaves to take lunch and she doesn’t get a conference period.

“When I have children in here and they don’t want to leave, why would I be dumb enough to get up and walk out?” she said.

She spends her days hunting down students who qualify for the program. She begs students to “please come back to school.” She badgers employers until they relent and allow students time off for class, she said.

“I incorporate any means necessary within the law to get them here and keep them here,” she said. “I do my dead-level best to ensure as many students who need it are in this program, and are successful.

“That’s my report card.”

Tacked on a bulletin board in Gilbert’s classroom is a black-and-white photograph of the first students who graduated from the program. She points to one boy who she said was fast “heading down the wrong path” before she encouraged him to sign up for the program. He graduated and joined the Navy.

Another student who got pregnant her senior year was determined to graduate. She spent 12 hours a day in Gilbert’s class until she gave birth. She graduated on the recommended program, a step above the minimum requirements to graduate.

On a recent weekday, Gonzalez was glued to his computer screen quietly answering questions about physics and chemistry. Gonzalez plans to stay in Gilbert’s program and continue taking courses on the computer so that he can be the first one among his siblings to earn a high school diploma.

“I want to show my parents I can do it,” he said.