The accountability program of North Carolina's 67 alternative schools was studied after its first year of implementation. North Carolina State Board of Education adopted a policy requiring alternative schools to participate in its ABCs Accountability Program during the 1999-2000 school year. The ABCs program is based on Accountability, Basics, and increased local Control. Alternative schools are public schools offering an alternative, nontraditional, program of instruction for students whose needs cannot be met in a regular school, even with special education programs. In North Carolina, alternative schools are hospital schools, special education schools, or vocational education schools. The accountability plan for each alternative school has six components: three based on state test scores and three based on local indicators in each school's improvement plan. The local superintendent and board of education must approve the Accountability Plan for each alternative school. The alternative schools qualify for recognition levels based on a specified rewards and sanctions schedule. In this first year, a total of 35 different indicators were used by alternative schools as local objective measures of accountability. A comparison of alternative school and regular K-12 school performance in North Carolina shows that alternative schools made the "Expected Growth" goal at almost twice the rate of the regular schools and had fewer schools receiving "no recognition." This may be an artifact of the way that alternative schools qualify for various levels of recognition. It is possible that a school could fail to meet any of the achievement levels based on the ABC program, but because it achieved the local objectives, it could reach the "expected" level of recognition. The results do suggest that it is possible to construct an accountability paradigm for nonstandard or alternative schools that will tap into their uniqueness and yet set an achievement standard as well. (SLD)