These youngsters are getting ready for tomorrow

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 2, 2001

ST. PETERSBURG -- Imagine a typical 14-year-old, and it probably wouldn't be Antwann Jackson.

Probably wouldn't be Brandon Hayward either. Or most of the 30 other boys sitting with him in the cafeteria at John Hopkins Middle School last Wednesday.

Typical 14-year-old boys don't talk about Eatonville or Zora Neale Hurston, the writer who grew up there. The typical 14 isn't working toward becoming a veterinarian, as Jackson is, or a professional basketball player, like 13-year-old Brandon Hayward. The typical teenage boy may be dreaming about those goals but not working toward them.

There is a difference. Jackson, Hayward and the other boys who were in that room understand it.

You can close your eyes and dream. You can kick back and look at the clouds and dream. But when you get up, or wake up, the dream is still just a dream and you're still not a step closer to it.

Jackson and the others in the room understand that working toward a goal means learning, initiative and taking responsibility for their actions and the consequences of them.

In the emotionally charged uncertainty since Sept. 11, many grief-stricken or just nervous faces have filled television screens to pass on the lesson they learned from the tragedy: "Live each day as if it may be your last. Tomorrow's not guaranteed."

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that thinking. If some people adopt it to help them maximize each day of their lives, to keep loose ends tied, then it can be a powerful tool for them. If some people use it to inspire them to have fun every day -- if fun is their priority -- then it also works for them.

But if history means anything, then the philosophy has a weakness: In our lives, tomorrow always comes. It always has. Every day of our lives has been a prelude to the next. Tomorrow may not be guaranteed, but the odds say it will come.

Living every day as if it's your last leaves room for that to be forgotten, allowing tomorrow to catch you unprepared.

If you must gamble, then bet with the smart money -- and bet big. There is a future. Stake your life on it.

The people sitting in the cafeteria, most of them 11 to 14 years old, are doing just that. Young people who have come to see the potential in their lives, who believe they can be a force in the world and not just a victim of it, are refreshing to see.

They were part of a Pinellas County Schools program called 500 Role Models of Excellence, which teams black, male middle school students with successful black men, all volunteers. Six role models will work with the 30 students at John Hopkins. They include a Coast Guard lieutenant commander, crime prevention specialists from the Urban League, school monitors and a police officer.

The group of students is a mix of eighth-graders in their last year of the program, seventh-graders in their second year and sixth-graders new to it.

A few minutes with some of the students leaves little room to doubt the program's effectiveness.

Jackson, a third-year veteran of the program, is sure of himself and discusses his aspirations with the confidence that comes only after much thought. He will be a veterinarian. In sixth grade, he was a C student who sometimes made Ds. He has lifted himself to being an A student who sometimes gets Bs.

He sees that as a step toward college, a necessary step for a veterinarian.

He also has developed a general appreciation for learning. He said some of his friends have not gotten to that point. "When we were taking our trip to the Zora (Neale Hurston) Fest, half of (his friends) thought it was just for fun. It was a learning experience," he said.

Brandon Hayward, the 13-year-old eighth-grader who is working on a professional basketball career, said he used to talk back to his mother. Now he understands there is a connection between respect and the NBA, and anything else worth having. He also understands leadership and is not bragging when he says he is a leader on the John Hopkins basketball team.

Kevin Rose, on the other hand, is an 11-year-old sixth-grader who has yet to connect the dots. He makes good grades, wants to play in the NBA and expects the association with the role models program to be fun and a learning experience, but he has not been shown the relationship between all of those seemingly unrelated topics.

That is part of the excitement that keeps Bradley Thurman, a school monitor who has been a role model volunteer since the program started, excited. "Some of the kids I started with are graduating," he said. "I see them working, driving UPS trucks."

Bruce Green, another school monitor who has been a role model from the start, remembers a lesson from a sports banquet when he was in college that makes him eager to help boys in the program learn etiquette. At the banquet, the speaker was about to talk when iced tea was served. Spoons clanged in glasses so loudly that the speaker had to wait as the woman who was like a team mother burned a stare their way and made a tiny stirring motion in the air.

Green likes to get the boys dressed nicely and take them to a restaurant. A byproduct is that behavior problems drop when they dress up, Green said.

"Respect is the key," Thurman said. "Respect and responsibility. They understand their behavior reflects on me, their parents, the community and their peers. Everything falls in line after that."

After the meeting, Green, Thurman, W.J. Bryant, the program's director, and Barbara Rosales, his assistant, talked with pride about students who had completed the program. They looked ahead to a year full of blossoming lives.

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