Tough Kids Turning

It had happened again. A 12-year-old kid had gotten kicked out of one of the city public schools, and because the scissors in her possession violated the Missouri Safe Schools Act, the expulsion was permanent.

Now, somehow, she had to finish high school. The Hon. Jimmie M. Edwards groaned. Missouri’s approach to compulsory education appalled him: “They provide an instructional professional to go to the child’s house and give the child three hours of instruction and leave. Usually they show up on a Monday morning at 7 a.m., and the kid is not there or won’t let them in, so they leave and come back the following Monday.” 

Leaving the kid nothing to do but get into more trouble. 

And wind up in front of the judge, eyes looking anywhere but into his.

Edwards took over the juvenile division of the 22nd Judicial Circuit’s family court in 2007. He knew right away what he wanted: a place to keep these kids—and everybody else—safe. A way to keep them learning and keep them out of trouble. 

A chance to prove the world was bigger than their city block. 

And a GPS system so he could keep tabs on them 24/7. 

He hadn’t found a way to get any of that in place yet, though. He went home brooding, flooded with a sense of helplessness he’d fought for years. In his own life, hard work and quiet persistence had been enough. He’d earned society’s trust, and the raps of his gavel were decisive. But now he needed a way to keep kids out of his courtroom.

The next morning, April 30, 2009, Edwards opened the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and read that the special administrative board of the St. Louis Public Schools was closing six schools.

He went straight to his chambers and tapped out a letter, asking whether he could use one of those empty schools to educate the 30 or so Safe Schools Act kids who couldn’t go anywhere else.

A response came back immediately: Was he serious? Three weeks later, he had a contract for the old Blewett School on Cass Avenue. 

Edwards had been eyeing a much smaller school, on Vandeventer Avenue, but a board member had called to ask if he’d take Blewett—and take some of SLPS’ suspended kids, too.

The board member didn’t even realize he was putting Edwards back in his old hood—he’d grown up right across the street from Blewett, on the near North Side. 

And his program for 30 kids had just mushroomed to more than 200, grades 6 through 12.

“OK, fine,” he replied equably. “Give me the worst kids. I want the kids everybody has turned their back on because they’re incorrigible.” 

He knew MERS Goodwill would partner with him; its director had already joined forces with the judge to help kids on parole get GEDs and jobs. He started contacting state agencies, local universities, lawyers, fraternities, philanthropists, nonprofits focused on children, companies, foundations, churches, the YMCA—45 community partners in all. 

Every one of them said yes. 

Together they shaped a school with three tiers: SLPS kids who’d been suspended (khaki pants); MERS kids who were trying to get their GED and a job (navy pants); and Division of Youth Services kids expelled under the Safe Schools Act (black pants). 

“I didn’t want my middle- and high-school kids with my older GED kids; I didn’t want that influence,” Edwards explains. “And DYS kids are a lot more sophisticated than the others.” 

Kids, building, wraparound services—now all he needed was a principal. SLPS launched the formal application process, and the judge selected three top candidates. A few minutes into each of the three interviews, he rose, beckoning the candidate to come with him. 

They walked over to the St. Louis City Juvenile Detention Center. Edwards had asked nine kids, some being held for offenses as serious as murder or rape, to do the interviewing. Nine-on-one. 

“I asked them to tell me which candidate would be best fit to address issues children have and to try to change the children,” he explains calmly. “And I told them I would take whichever person they selected.”

I try not to look startled. 

“It was amazing,” he says, “when I gave them that responsibility, how seriously they took it. The irony is, they wanted somebody they thought could actually change kids like them.”

So who’d they choose? 

“Marvin Talley. First of all, they said, he was not afraid of them. Second, he looked them in the eye. And third, even when they were disrespectful, he continued to be respectful.” 

And did you tell them to test the candidates by being disrespectful? 

Edwards’ laugh booms. “I didn’t have to.”

How the heck did you get away with letting kids in detention hire a principal? 

“I just do stuff. You’ve got to be outside the box sometimes.”

Anybody give you any flak about your methodology?

“Nope. I’m the judge.” 

In August 2009, four months after Edwards mailed his letter, Innovative Concept Academy unlocked its doors. Actually, just one door—the one in front of the metal detector. “We are the only school in the city with an X-ray machine,” Edwards says. “I X-ray everything that comes in.” Phones and MP3 players are taken away until the end of the day. 

“We get wanded in through one of those,” a boy tells me, jerking his thumb toward the metal detector. “We get patted down, we sign the attendance sheet, then we walk into the cafeteria until Mr. Talley, he gives us a talk about how to be a better person.”

Guards, teachers, even the janitor—every grown-up here stays vigilant. No sagging pants; no loud, combative voices. No disrespect.

ICA is the first community partnership school in the country overseen by a judge. The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, paid an early visit. Oprah Winfrey’s producers showed interest. (Edwards looks guilty; he’s been too busy to get back to them with details.) The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, visited last December. She asked a group of boys if they liked wearing their uniform, and one surprised her with an instant, heartfelt yes. She asked him why. 

He thought about it. “The tie makes me feel smart,” he said, fingering the knot. “When I ask a question in the classroom, teachers listen.” 

Edwards told her later, “After school they will pull the pants down, but they will keep the tie on.”

After school is a large chunk of time: ICA’s days run long, from 9 a.m. until at least 6:30 p.m. This is deliberate. 

“Most offenses in the city of St. Louis occur between 3 and 9:30 p.m., after school,” Edwards points out. He insists on after-school activities until 6:30 p.m., and the kids he requires to report every evening don’t leave until 7:30 p.m. 

“People say, ‘How can this do any good when they are going back to their own environment?’ Well, we keep them until 6:30 or 7:30 at night, and they can sustain that until the next morning. And when they go back to public school, we can say, ‘Come back to our after-school program.’ Any kid in the city can participate.” 

It’s not just busywork or gym time, either. Edwards wants those hours filled with mandatory extracurricular programs that will rock the kids’ world: golf, chess, ballroom dance, classical music, creative writing… 

“Golf’s not as easy as it looks,” one boy informs me. “You have got to make sure your body movements are, like, right, for you to hit that little-bitty ball just right.” 

Chess requires learning to think several steps ahead. It also demands patience and self-control. And any move you make has its own inescapable consequences. 

“This is a real battle; it’s like fighting with their minds,” chess instructor Bill Thompson remarks. “If they can learn to control their tempers and their minds, it helps them every day.” He talks for a minute about “stalemate” and how to know when there’s still hope—“Can you do something else and still win?”

The best chess player at ICA, Edwards says, is a 14-year-old who “was locked up on a very, very serious offense. He’s here now, doing a great job.”

And Edwards’ favorite photograph so far is of a young woman, tattoos covering her like a second skin, holding a violin to her chin. She’s rapt, her concentration pure. 

“The tattoos were gang insignias,” he says. “That photograph was a total contradiction. We say, ‘OK, fine, you can have tattoos. We can’t take your past away from you. I’m not even trying to get you to forget where you came from, because you never should.’”

What he is trying to do worked. The student tried something new, learned to appreciate a different kind of beauty. From there, she could learn to dream about a different future. 

“You have to have been exposed to positive things,” he exclaims. “How do you know you don’t like guacamole? You’ve never tasted it!” He sets aside the imaginary argument and leans forward. “We are trying to teach them how to read. Because if you can’t read, you can’t use your imagination, and then you can’t dream. 

“Nobody dreams about negative things,” he adds. “We call those nightmares.”

Edwards goes to ICA two or three times a day.

“Hey, Judge!”

“Hey, Mariah!”

“’Sup, Judge?” 

“Judge, my dad wanted me to come to this school so bad!”

Down the hall, a young man as tall as Edwards surreptitiously alters his course so he can saunter past. “Hi, Judge Edwards!” he says, slowing but keeping his eyes straight ahead. 

The judge stops. “How are you doing?” he asks, looking closely at the student’s face. “Have you been a good boy?” 

The phrasing’s deliberate: These are children. They might be cooking for themselves or working to pay an incarcerated mother’s bills; they might have flourished a gun on the street or seen a friend shot. But 

they’re children. 

“With our middle-school kids, we had an Easter-egg hunt behind the school,” Edwards tells me in late April, “and they got really excited. And the Friday before Mother’s Day, they will get little silk flowers and nice vases for their moms or grandmothers or guardians. It will be the first time these kids have ever considered giving their mom or their grandmama anything.” 

Many of us are so numbed by years of social and pedagogical theory, it’s bizarre to realize how many of these kids’ problems—on the surface, at least—boil down to simple manners.

They think they have to yell to be heard, because they grew up with people yelling.

They’ve never learned what are snootily called social graces—but which would allow them to carry themselves with confidence into new situations.

They readily admit to being short-tempered and undisciplined, and they fight at the first flash of an insult. 

“Kids fight every day or three times a week,” confides Tiara, a student who spent the fall semester at ICA. “He say–she say stuff, or somebody said something to them about their mama, or someone else had offended them. They’re short-tempered. They don’t know what to believe, because their friends tell them one thing, and then other people tell them another.” Her advice? “Just leave it alone. Walk away. You have better things to do. They taught us how to avoid fights. And if you still have problems, go to somebody that’s grown, and they will try to fix it.” Does that work? She sighs. “Sometimes it works.”

What’s under most of the fighting is a fierce, almost desperate need to be respected. And what’s under most of the disrespect is fear.

Edwards talks about an eighth-grader, “real tough, disrespectful, the whole nine yards. I brought her in to court, and she tested positive for marijuana. Her mom comes to pick her up four hours later and is totally upset, because here’s a kid Mom believes is an angel. The mother says, ‘But she’s afraid of her own shadow!’ 

“I had a boy in court,” he continues, “and his mom said, ‘He isn’t tough. He’s afraid to sleep in his own room, and he’s 15 years old!’

“These kids think they have to act tough,” Edwards sighs. “They have it all backwards. They think they have to be loud and disruptive instead of being quiet and unassuming. The kids that do well in our community”—he may be talking about himself here—“are kids that don’t get into the mix. Those kids are called nerds. And they have a great life. Because nobody’s going to want to fight them.”

Why, to kids so young and so far from the usual corridors of status, is respect so critical that they’ll bloody themselves to get it? 

“Because they haven’t gotten it at home. They haven’t gotten it in their neighborhood. When their mom wakes them up, all they hear is swearing. I’m willing to bet the vast majority of my kids don’t hear the words ‘I love you’ when they leave home. They are more likely to hear ‘Get your ass outta here.’ She’s yelling and screaming to get them out of the bed, and when they get to school, they are already riled up. They have to make the adjustment. About 95 percent make it very quickly, and some make it later in the day, and a few can’t make it at all.” 

Then there are the pants, which have a gravity all their own. Edwards can’t walk five steps without telling somebody to pull up his pants; it’s become so reflexive, he might say it to a grown-up on the sidewalk someday. 

One kid’s buttocks crest the back waistband as he swaggers down the hall. He tells me he doesn’t know why ICA makes such a big deal out of it: “The saggin’ pants is a look. We don’t see it as trying to be a gangster… Well, I don’t.” 

I repeat his rationale to the judge, who isn’t having it. “It’s style because they get it from television, all the rappers. They perceive it as cool. But it’s important to correct it, because it’s just growing up and being decent. I ask them, ‘What would you think if Judge Edwards came in here and his pants were down on his butt?’ And they say they’d be upset.”

Justice wound up at ICA because of “truancy and, well, possession of marijuana, but it wasn’t mine.” Her first impression: “It was calm. It wasn’t rowdy, like regular high school.” She’d come from Sumner High School, although she’d started at Central Visual & Performing Arts: “I got put out of there for fighting. I got an anger problem. People will just be irking me.”

Of the 246 students who went through ICA in the first year, 71—almost 29 percent—were there for fighting. “Girl fights, they can really be dramatic,” Justice remarks. “Clothes pulled, hair getting pulled out, scratching… Once somebody hit me with a combination lock. In my face. See, that’s why I don’t want to be fighting anymore. I feel like I’m too pretty and too smart to be acting like a fool.”

When I ask about future plans, most kids at ICA answer with either a fantasy borrowed from the media (“Play pro football,” from a kid who’s never been on a team) or a constrained compromise (“Go to a community college,” not a university; “become a barber,” not a lawyer). Justice, though, is both practical and ambitious: “I’m gonna go to cosmetology school and work at a hair salon and spa, and when I am 23, I want to move to Miami to go to the art institute for fashion and merchandising.”

Her mom’s a manager at a service station. Her dad? “He’s in my life,” she says quickly. “He works for Waste Management—you know, the people who pick up the trash? And I have two sisters and two brothers.” She already knows what she wants to teach them about life: “That it’s not easy. It’s very complicated. And you just got to be strong.” 

Justice says she’ll miss the ICA staff most of all: “Mr. Talley always gives me pep talks, that I have so much potential in me, and that I’m going to succeed in life and just be somebody.” Did anyone tell you that at Sumner? “No,” she says with cool dignity, “I didn’t get that type of support from the administration.”

She says of Judge Edwards, “He reminds me of me, ’cause he stands up for what he believes in. He cares about us.” Playing devil’s advocate, I ask how she knows his caring is genuine. “People was throwin’ food in the cafeteria, so the lunch lady had served everybody PBJ sandwiches. I’m like, ‘Everybody can’t eat PBJ sandwiches’ [she’s allergic to nuts], and he went in and talked to the people in charge of the lunches,” she says with a triumphant flourish. “And if people have on a torn shirt or something, he’ll get them a shirt!” 

A lot of kids at ICA talk first about the food; without it, many would be fending for themselves, grabbing makeshift meals from vending machines or convenience stores. They bring up the clothes, too: “They buy you interview clothes to get you a job,” Keith marvels. “Don’t ask for anything back, it’s all this help, just so you can make it. Haircuts, gas, all types of stuff, just to come here and learn.” 

I ask how he wound up at ICA. “Stolen car,” he shrugs. “I went to Soldan. I wasn’t trippin’ off of school. But a lot of things are different here. They make sure we dress, make sure we’re OK, ask about our personal life if we feel like talking.” He starts to leave, then wheels around and comes back to shake hands formally.

ICA ordered more than enough uniforms for its first year. But by the second semester, the pile of shirts had dwindled. The puzzled staff finally realized that a lot of the kids didn’t have washing machines in their homes, so they were wearing their white shirt as long as they could, and once the dirt was ground in worse than any Tide commercial, they’d just pitch it, mumble that it got lost. 

New solution: a weekly shirt exchange, dirty for clean, every Wednesday, and jumbo washing machines at school. 

These aren’t just practical issues.

“Poverty affects their psyche in a way that says, ‘I can’t have anything. I’m without now; I’ll always be without,’” says Ricky Lomax, a skinny, soft-voiced counselor who meets with the kids regularly. “They don’t know how to look past the current situation. They don’t have any confidence or hope. Poverty can lock your mind into that way of thinking.” 

In the hallway, a poster leans against an easel: “If you constantly think about the lack of, you can never focus on the gain. Your thoughts are powerful. The mind is a tool, an instrument that plays beautiful music when used properly.” 

Signs in the adjacent display case: “Who gave you the right to take a life?” “Is it snitching if you are the victim?” “Silence = fear.”

“They challenging kids,” Vernon Henderson says with a grin. “They have a hard upbringing. Living in the city and growing up within these communities, they have to act a certain way: They have to be able to protect themselves, but also be themselves.”

Henderson grew up the same way; he now works with Community Conflict Services, helping run the ART program. It stands for Aggression Replacement Training, but ICA would just as soon not emphasize that. Every time Henderson leads a discussion, he’s subtly stressing moral reasoning, anger control, responsibility, and accountability. 

“You can’t change them overnight,” he concedes. “But you can make them think for, like, 10 seconds when there is a decision to be made. Because when they make a mistake now, it can really be detrimental.

“It used to be that the neighbors kind of raised you,” he says suddenly. “To use profanity was not tolerated. So many people were watching, and they helped mold and shape you. At some point, we lost that. People began to be afraid of the kids—or wanted to use them for their own gain.”

The biggest challenge with ICA students, he says, is that “they don’t know how to deal with emotions. These kids are taking care of themselves. They think they grown. But when they get upset, they lose everything. The only thing they know how to do is what they have learned—hollerin’ or acting out.

“Simple things kids get—‘How was your day at school?’ ‘How’s my baby?’—a lot of the love and affection just doesn’t exist for them. And it’s hard for them to show their feelings; remember, they have got to protect themselves.

So that’s why they’re tough? He shrugs. “A tough kid is just a kid that will try to keep you from getting close to him, because the only thing he’s felt is pain.”   

Henderson runs “talking circles,” in which kids pass a brightly colored plastic “talking stick” and speak, unjudged and uninterrupted, about their lives. At the real talking circles, all sorts of things come up, from secret fears to incidents of abuse. They staged a mock one for my visit, but plenty still surfaced.

“Everything ain’t been goin’, like, right, or as expected, today,” Keith says. “I don’t feel like going towork, I just feel so tired, you know?” A few minutes later, he says, again, “I’m tired. My body’s tired.” But when Henderson asks people what’s going well, he brightens: “I got a job, and I’m bringing home some income to help my mom out, ’cause she’s got a lot of bills.”

Chanel bursts in, exclaiming that she just got a job at Steak ’n Shake. Huge applause. 

Henderson asks the students what they’d change about themselves to be a better person, “My personality toward people I don’t know,” says Janine. “Especially, like, if you come towards me the wrong way, and I don’t know you.” 

“My attitude and my mouth,” says Geneshia, “’cause when people say something to me, I say something back.” 

And if they could change something in their surroundings to make themselves better? 

“The people I’m around, the hood,” says Dom, and the next three kids agree instantly. “I can’t see my own front without having to see fools,” complains Keith. “Don’t get me killed!”

“The police!” bursts Sierra. “To get off me. My parole officer…the law, period. I don’t like the police. It would make me a better person, 

because when they on me, I’m gonna do the opposite.” 

She talks about wanting to “start taking stuff serious instead of goofing off… I’m actually very smart, but I just take stuff the wrong way.  Always try to have fun instead of doing something serious.” 

I’ve got her figured as a playbaby, cavalier about rules and expectations, determined to avoid growing up. Then Henderson asks what’s hardest right now, and she bursts, “Not havin’ my momma around. My mother’s paralyzed. My momma, I’m sort of used to having her around.”

After everyone leaves, Henderson says quietly, “They are like normal kids. But they have all this other stuff they go through.” 

“They are mad. They are mad at the world,” says one of the ICA security officers, blaming absentee parents for the most part. “Even if you give them a mentor, the love they want is from that mother.”

And the mother’s not around, adds a staff member who’s paused to chat. “We have parents who change their phone numbers or give fake numbers.” They’re not worried about consequences, she adds: “They know, ‘If you suspend my child, I’m gonna go downtown and act the fool’—and the suspension is rescinded.” 

“Not only that, these young kids can’t even go across the street, because they will have to fight,” the security officer says. “You’ve got one side of the street fighting the other. I’ve never seen peer pressure like this.”

“They glorify anything negative,” the staffer says. “They love it. You would think they’d want to get away from it, but they think that’s lame. Everybody has to be harder than everybody else.” 

Edwards and his staff soon noticed that the worst of the posturing happened in a student’s first week at ICA. The kids had just gotten kicked out of Sumner or Roosevelt; they were in new territory, uncertain, so they acted out, talked back, refused to do the work. 

ICA created a weeklong orientation. “Discussions with me, the DJOs [deputy juvenile officers], psychiatrists, the police,” Edwards says, his voice grim, his eyes twinkling. “By the time we move that child into the classroom, that child knows exactly what to expect.”

It made a difference. So did the great gender divide. 

“My middle-school kids are silly,” Edwards notes, explaining that the boys and girls squirm and flirt and posture in front of each other. Midway through the year, he separated them into single-sex classes, and a beautiful calm came over the classrooms of ICA.

Metropolitan Police Department Detective Dana Isom works with the GREAT Program: Gang Resistance Education and Training. She doesn’t speak the gangs’ names, though, “because then it gives them a little glory.” 

Besides, it’s hard to keep up without a score card. “It used to be clear-cut: this gang and this gang and these colors and those,’” she says, sounding almost nostalgic. “Now they’re broken up into little-bitty cells, and everybody’s in it or friends with someone who is. One group might have 16 or 17 different groups within that overall group, and some of them don’t like each other. One group might break off tomorrow and be two different groups.”

She urges students to avoid gangs, set goals, focus. “They will tell you, ‘Detective Isom, I don’t plan to live that long,’ or ‘I don’t know—I might not make it that long.’ I say, ‘But if you do!’”

The boys are keenly aware of the odds of dying young. They talk about it like a talisman, a taunt, an excuse to not care. And the girls just keep watching people die around them. The father of one of Isom’s students stood in front of her and shot her mother and then himself. 

“That was just a few months ago, and she’s walking around laughing,” Isom says, shaking her head. “Another kid said he got shot six times.” Are they resilient, she wonders, or is their response more brittle?

Asked what advice she’d give to a new GREAT teacher, she says, “Ooooh. Thick skin. Zero tolerance. They’re pretty smart kids, so they know how to work the system, and they know how to work adults. They will try to scam you, belittle you, disrespect you, and you have to nip it right in the bud.

“I had to handcuff a couple people in the classroom,” she confides, “one of them a little-bitty girl. They were throwing up gang signs, so I just started writing their names down and what gang they were with.” They panicked, telling her to stop and asking her why she was writing. “Because you’ve just claimed a gang in front of a police officer,” she told them calmly. “So they just kind of went crazy.”

The second semester, Isom decided to start her class a new way. She stood at the board and wrote, in big block letters, “POLICE.” Then she told the students, “Whatever comes to mind, write it down. I don’t care if it’s a cuss word.” When the scribbling stopped, she said, “Write down what purpose we serve.” Then she asked a third question: “Are we necessary?” 

“I got everything from ‘dirty cops’ to ‘they beat people’ and ‘they take our drugs’ and all the bad names they call us—‘pig,’ the B-word…” she says. “But to the last question, everybody said yes.” 

I sit in on a class in April. The girls come in reluctantly; it’s hot and stuffy. One puts her head down; Isom gets it back up again with a firm request. Another asks to sit near the door. 

But halfway through, when Isom’s talking about saying no and meaning it, and she mimes a girl saying no coyly when a guy asks for a kiss, they all start paying attention.

After class, they gather around her, and she stays, talking lightly with them. She tells them she’d love them to be in a pageant, like her daughter. But it costs money.

How much, they want to know. “Some are $75, some more,” she says. “Maybe we could have a fundraiser.” 

“We’re washing cars for Haiti,” one of the girls volunteers.

“Well, you could wash cars for this, too.” She starts telling them about the pretty ball gowns they could wear. 

“What would I look like in a dress like that?” one girl asks mockingly.

“Like what you are,” Isom says quietly. “A lady.”

Some of the kids from the St. Louis Public Schools are only at ICA for 180 days, hardly enough time to build any momentum. But the MERS students are there for at least a year, and that helps. 

“I’ve been surprised how well the children have adapted outside their environment,” remarks MERS assistant vice president Esther Williams. “In the city, it’s very territorial; you have to be careful when you are crossing lines. One girl, on her way to school, they shot at her. She ran into a vacant house. I thought, ‘This kid is never coming back.’ And she did.”

A group of MERS students is finishing class in the next room, and they stay to assess ICA for me. “I’m closer to finishing something now,” says one young man. “I’m focused more, because everybody’s chasing the same goal.” 

“I can think more here,” another student says. “There are less people. You got teachers that actually take time and help you.”

That’s the definining difference. The academics at ICA are basic, with a strong emphasis on reading and an extra push toward math and science. The secret weapon is small class sizes, which allow quiet, focus, and individualized teaching.

“It makes you feel like you’re doin’ something,” adds a third student. At his original school, what got in the way? “Distractions. All your friends. Too much freedom. Basically, you on your own, with your peers too much. The teachers aren’t really hands-on like these. You can’t daydream for five seconds here!”

So how would he change the public schools? “I’d take this whole environment, this whole school, the caseworkers, the little groups that we do, talking about personal problems…take them to the main schools.” One of the girls is nodding vigorously: “If it can change us, it can change everybody else, too.” 

What doesn’t work at the public schools? “Just throwing the assignment out there without explaining,” the third young man says. “They don’t know how to make the students stay on track.” Advice he’d give the SLPS teachers? “Be hard with the truth instead of lying. Here, you feel like the teachers won’t make it if you don’t make it. They take time out of their day; they make you feel like a real team. In a regular school, they will be hard on you, but it’s mean.”

A young woman chimes in: “You gotta want to teach to be a teacher.” At her old school, she says, “Teachers would stop teaching because they had a problem over here. You are supposed to keep teaching your class! ’Cause everybody else wants to learn, and you are going to stop all learning for this one person.” 

She says at first she was “nervous about being here, but now I’m calm.” What made the difference? “Being able to go to any staff member that I wanted to and talk to them about any problems that I had. That calmed me down and got me some help.” 

The kids talk repeatedly about “space,” how the school’s not so crowded, not so loud. “You just walk in here and you don’t feel no tension or nothing,” one marvels.

“I thought I was going to be in a fight the first day here,” admits the second young man. “But I’m still here!” He’s changed a lot, he adds: “I used to be one of those dudes who was really antisocial. I used to talk to nobody.”

“We had to shape you up, too, you know!” the young woman informs him. “Put pressure on you to stay focused.”

“Every new kid that comes, they automatically sink in, get in that comfort zone,” the third young man says, “’cause they see everybody else doing their work.” At regular school, “you got a lot of triggers. Eventually you are going to snap and be distracted from something. You don’t have the person always in your ear telling you, ‘That ain’t right.’ These people do that every day. They tell you before you even do it!”  

Tre’s friends nudge each other when they see a videographer filming him. “I’m gettin’ my camera time,” he calls. “I’m in hair and makeup right now!” 

When they leave, he turns serious. He’s at ICA because he fights; he fights “because of my attitude. It’s bad. If you disrespect me, and you keep amping it up, I’ll get frustrated.” He was scared to come to ICA from Beaumont High School, he says: scared “that I would get in more trouble than I did there, fighting.” Why more? “’Cause it’s more troubled kids. They all like me.”

Living in gang territory, he says, “You have to be careful what you say, where you go at certain times. You don’t really have to worry about what you wear; it’s mostly…” He trails off, reluctant to give details. He’s been in a gang; he says people join because “they want to feel like somebody’s watching their back.” What did you have to prove to get into the gang? “That I was about bidness. That 

I could fight.”

He breaks off midsentence and composes his face into aristocratic hauteur, straightens his back, and crosses his legs, wrapping laced fingers around his knee and tilting his head. All he needs is a cigarette to look like David Niven. 

“That’s the judge,” he explains, nodding toward the figure entering the building. “The judge is cool.”

Once Edwards is out of sight, Tre talks about how things change when you join a gang: “You notice people start treating you different. You start getting more respect. If I was walking down the hall by myself, but my gang was around, they just going to let me walk past. It tells them they shouldn’t mess with that person.”

Makes sense. Later, I repeat this notion to Edwards. Are gangs as much about social protection as they are about turf, identity, or surrogate family? If they guarantee safe passage…

“Well, that’s not true,” he retorts. “That’s that misperception you have with 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds.” (I don’t mention that I bought it, too.) “The purpose of a gang, when they first came about in the late ’70s, was to sell drugs,” he continues. “These kids have moved it to ‘That’s my family, they the only ones love me.’ But when they get themselves in trouble, the gang is not standing next to them.

“They have this great misperception about where they come from, where they live,” he continues, sudden emotion in his voice. “None of them own anything in that neighborhood! How can you claim that? And why would you claim it, when everything is broken down and poor? If you are going to claim something, claim something nice!”

Marvin Talley coached basketball at Riverview Gardens High School, then became dean of students, then moved to Vashon High School as assistant principal. Now he’s got a school filled with kids who’ve made mistakes—“everything from fights to weapons charges to drug possession, assaults, and threats.” 

So how does he feel about “tough love”?

“What’s right about it is the word ‘love,’” he replies instantly. “‘I love you enough to challenge you to do the right thing, and I’m unwavering on that, because you matter to me that much.’

“If you really love kids, you can be really tough on them,” he adds. “But there’s no fake and phony. They despise fake. There’s a term our kids use: They will ask, ‘Do you feel me?’ That’s an internal thing. That’s at the heart.” 

So when Talley has to discipline a kid, that’s where he starts, feeling his way until he’s figured out how to make that particular kid see the light. “I have to deal with the heart, because the heart will move the body. It will direct the mind.”

He walks through the halls, stopping every few minutes to settle a flare-up or redirect a kid’s raw energy. After school, he shoots hoops with some of the boys. After some fast and furious dribbling, he takes a shot from midcourt, and it hits the rim and wobbles off. Encouraged, one of the kids tries a long shot and makes it. Everybody cheers. A minute later, another kid steals the ball and dribbles it down the court. Talley guards him, stays on him.

He wants that ball in his court.

Day one, second semester. The judge pokes his head into a classroom, scans the occupants’ attire with narrowed eyes. “When I come back, all you guys better have your uniforms on!”

“I keeps mine on,” one of the boys exclaims, popping open the snaps of his jacket with a flourish.

“Pants is up,” another says, his tone a little hurt. He hikes his jacket to show the judge.

Edwards grins. “Good boys.” 

He’s thrilled that they’ve settled in, and already seem to take some pride in ICA. Nobody’s scrawling gang signs on school property, for example. But that doesn’t mean they’ve turned into angels. Fights break out, behavior veers off course, and the judge doesn’t hesitate to yank kids down to court and even lock them up for a day or two, if he needs to. It’s happened maybe 15 times, he says: “And most of the kids who have had that time out have not come back to court.” 

They found a boundary. 

At the end of the first semester, 40 kids’ suspensions were up; they would return to their regular schools in January.

Almost all of them asked if they could stay instead. One girl’s mother pleaded with the judge, saying her daughter had never done so well. Another girl threatened to break whatever rules she had to break to come back.

“I did not expect this problem,” Edwards says heavily. “I did not expect it to have such a devastating impact on the child. They want to stay."

“On December 18, they received letters saying, ‘Your behavior has been superior, you have been a model student, and for all of that, you get to go back to your home school’—which is terrible,” he says bitterly. “The solution would be to keep them here until they graduate—and the school board is saying, ‘Please, keep them, Judge, because over there you have a 92 to 95 percent attendance rate. But if I say, ‘OK, I’ll keep the 40,’ they still want to send me 125 more. And it’s imperative to keep this program small.” 

Edwards’ only hope was that they’d go back with skills that would make the old environment easier to negotiate. But in early April, a mother called about her daughter, who’d returned to Beaumont in January: “She’s acting out, she’s disrespectful at home, and she’s not going to class.” Apparently the girl said the only way she’d behave was if she could return to ICA. 

And she couldn’t. 

Tiara, who was suspended from Gateway High School after a group fight, wasn’t wild about going to ICA: “I thought it wasn’t going to be a good school, whatever. But my grades started improving. Whether it’s school-related or not, they will help you out.” By the semester’s end, she says, “I was sad to go. I thought, ‘When I go back to Gateway, I know my grades are going to change, and all my friends there are going to kind of get me off track in my work. At ICA, there weren’t that many students in the classes, and the teachers actually went one-on-one with you.” 

ICA doesn’t have a lavish budget, but its teachers have a luxury rarer than beluga caviar: They can give individual attention.

The usual yardsticks are in place, the quantitative measures and evaluations. Professors at the University of Missouri–St. Louis will be tracking the school’s progress; so will national education and nonviolence organizations. But Edwards isn’t the least bit interested in what he calls “the pea counters.” 

“Do you do good by children when nobody’s looking?” he asks teachers again and again, spacing the words deliberately so they sink in. “That is the only thing I want to know.” 

As for the kids, he asks them “to give me an effort like you have never given in your life. If you are in the 12th grade and you can’t read, we’re gonna start all over again. And once you are able to identify a noun and a verb, we are going to applaud that. And we are just going to keep applauding until we have gotten you to the level where you are supposed to be.”

He stops for a second—sagging pants in his peripheral vision. “You know,” he says over his shoulder, “the director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice said, ‘How is he going to take all these bad kids and put them in one room and expect any civility?’ We’ve had nine months of school, and we’ve had nine months of civility.”

He heads down the hall, following the sound of piano keys gliding into a new key, crashing in perfect chords, pulling out a melody that sounds like Franz Liszt hanging out with Glenn Miller.

Gerrell is practicing.

“He uses his lunch hour to play,” Edwards murmurs to me. “When we got the piano, he snuck in the conference room with the lights off and started to play very softly. So we moved the piano into the gym.”

Gerrell’s pretty much ignoring us, his fingers weaving a spell that makes me want to just shut up and listen. But I do have questions. Have you been playing long? “Nope.” Are you taking lessons?“No.” How has playing changed your life? “I got something to do now.” Do you think it will make any difference to your future? “Yeah, ’cause I didn’t know I could do all this at first.”

Just how long have you been playing?

“Three months. I got here in January and started in February.”

“He’s actually a really good kid,” Edwards says outside the gym door. “He was a really angry kid when he came here. Now…his music isn’t rap; his music isn’t hip-hop. There’s this jazz orchestra feel to it. I often wonder, ‘Where is this coming from? What’s in his mind, that he could play so beautifully?’ We are only now starting to expose him to things outside his neighborhood…”

We stand in the hall, talking. Suddenly a fight erupts—chairs scraping, at least five or six voices yelling, somebody banging on a table. A security officer’s there immediately, eyes narrowed, looking through the glass, hand on the knob.

Then she grins.

They’re arguing over a chess game.