The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  If the school was serious, Changa-Moon says, it could take the money raised from Bill Gates and others and then go to an open admissions policy, in which slots at the school would be given by lottery. Then everyone would truly have a shot at a Lakeside education.

  In the end, both Blakely and Changa-Moon say that going to Lakeside will probably alter the rest of their lives. “You can find all sorts of studies and stuff about the poor and what’s going on in their environment, but you don’t hear one thing about the rich and what they’re living like, where they go, all that stuff, you have no idea, and this was able to open my eyes and I got to see, what is it?” Changa-Moon says. “What do these people do? What are they like? What is this whole top two percent? What is that life like? And so I got to see where lots of decisions get made and how they get made and who makes them, and I got to see what that was like and I got to see what that was, and now I have friends in those places. I think that provides me a huge opportunity. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but it’s there.”

  With his mixed emotions about being chosen as part of the modern-day Talented Tenth, Blakely tells me he is already feeling guilty about not returning to the school to mentor other students of color. “They’re going to always be Terrance Blakelys,” he says. “There’s going to always be Davids, there’s going to always be us. We just came through the system and that’s fine, but they’re going to bring someone else in and they’re going to be the next kid on the basketball team that gets good grades. It’s not going to stop. And they’re going to come in and they’re going to deal with the same psychological and emotional stuff that we did. I would have loved if someone would have come back down to talk to me.”

  But, he says, there’s a reason why very few African-American graduates stay involved with the school. For the average Lakeside alum, he says, “You go back because it reminds you of happy times—‘These are kids I grew up with, this was a great place for me.’ The minorities, they go back thinking, ‘This is a place where I was isolated.’ There’s a girl that spent every lunch period by herself in one room. How is she going to go back? She doesn’t have those experiences. And then, from my position, with those experiences I do have, I got them potentially because I had to sell a little bit of myself, so I mean is that something I really want to glorify? I think it’s different. It’s completely rational why people don’t go back, because they don’t have good memories.”

  …

  One drizzly, gray Saturday morning, I drive to a public middle school in the South End to meet Ronnie Cunningham. Ronnie, who graduated from Lakeside in 1986, was the first black student to make it all the way from fifth grade to senior year, a “lifer.” His mom had been the one who tipped off Eric Hampton’s dad about the school. When I was in eighth grade, Ronnie was the star running back on the football team. I knew him from his letterman’s jacket, which was gold and maroon—the Lakeside school colors—and had MR. CUNNINGHAM written on the back in cursive. He now works as a staff psychologist at a nonprofit for minority students called Rainier Scholars.

  When I get to the school, I find the cafeteria, and quickly spot Ronnie, who still has the compact frame of a running back. He wears jeans and a maroon sweater, has a goatee flecked with gray and a friendly yet contemplative manner. There are about sixty fifth-graders in the room, sitting at or standing among the long lunchroom tables and chattering among themselves. Ronnie yells out that they need to get their stuff together and get ready to go to class.

  As the kids file out, Ronnie and I walk to a registration table that’s been set up in the hall. Ronnie introduces me to Bob Hurlbut, the founder of the program. Hurlbut is, in his own words, a “fat, middle-aged white guy.” A former software salesman who was also active in Young Life, a Christian organization for youth, Hurlbut tells me that he was looking for meaning in his life when he happened to read Hope in the Unseen, a book by the journalist Ron Suskind that tells the story of a low-income African-American student who goes from public school in Washington, D.C., to Brown University. At Brown, the student meets some other black students from poor backgrounds who seem much better prepared for the Ivy League. It turns out that they came out of a New York City program called Prep for Prep. That sparked Hurlbut to do some research, and in 2002 he started Rainier Scholars based on a similar model.

  The program, which is privately funded by donations from places such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, uses fourth-grade test scores to identify minority students who show potential. It sends letters to their parents and invites them to apply. Eventually, after more testing and interviews, about sixty kids—all students of color—get admitted before the start of sixth grade. For the summers before and after that year, they attend school every day, taking intensive math, science, and English classes. During the school year, they have classes every Saturday, and are expected to do several hours of homework—on top of their regular classwork—every night. The students have frequent one-on-one and group meetings with Ronnie and other staff members to talk about their progress and any challenges they are facing. The program also hires summer counselors—David Changa-Moon was one—to work with the students.

  Nearly all of the students in the program get accepted into either a private school or an advanced program in the Seattle public schools. Counselors continue to meet with the kids once they get past the intensive first couple of years, teaching classes in leadership and helping them find internships. They also help them with college choices. The idea is to provide all the support that a “normal” student from an upper-middle-class family would receive as a matter of course. Rainier Scholars estimates it spends $27,000 on each student over the seven years they’re in the program.

  As Hurlbut and I stand in the hallway and talk, a stream of parents and kids enters the building. There are Somalis, Ethiopians, African Americans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians—the full cross section of South Seattle. A couple of staff members welcome them, hand out information packs, and guide them through the auditorium doors by which Hurlbut and I are standing. After a while he excuses himself, and I take a seat in the audience.

  This is a recruiting day. The staff has sent several hundred letters to the families of minority students who scored well on the WASL standardized test. Now it is Hurlbut’s job to convince them to formally apply.

  Ronnie gets onstage and gives a few introductory remarks before Hurlbut takes the microphone with a burst of energy. He wears khakis and a white dress shirt. His belly hangs down over his belt, a brushy mustache perches above his upper lip, and his hair is unkempt. The salesmanlike and evangelical parts of his personality come to the surface. “If you don’t believe that college preparation starts in fifth grade, you’re wrong,” he says.

  The more Hurlbut talks, the more animated he becomes. Several of the parents around me pay close attention, nodding as he speaks. “We’re developing a new generation of leaders for our country,” he says. “You have talented kids, and we’re going to take that talent and put it to the test. This is about choices—who they want to be and how they’ll get there. It’s so you get to choose who you will be instead of someone choosing for you. If your child gets an education, he or she will probably go on to be president and CEO of a company, not just a worker bee.”

  When Hurlbut finishes, the parents sit in their seats and fill out the interest form that will start the process of getting into the program. As they leave, they line up at the registration table to drop them off.

  After the parents have thinned out, Ronnie tells me that after he got his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Washington, he wanted to come back and do something in the community where he grew up. He had basically gotten into private school on a fluke—he had tagged along with his sister as she went to LEEP, the Lakeside summer program for minority students. The idea behind Rainier Scholars appealed to him as a way to institutionalize the process of identifying talented students of color and to stop them from slipping through the cracks.

 
His job includes meeting with administrators at private schools such as Lakeside—Ronnie tells me he is a member of the alumni board in part to “hold their feet to the fire” on race issues—and talking to them about how many Rainier Scholars they might take. He tells me that they seem to have hit a wall—the private schools took about as many in the first year as they did in following years. The problem is that there are many more qualified and talented minority kids than open slots.

  Ronnie’s comment raises larger questions. Rainier Scholars, in many ways, is a much more organized advance on Randy’s Finley’s efforts in the late 1980s—Hurlbut, with his mustache, large frame, and folksy salesmanship, even bears a striking resemblance to Finley. Hurlbut also has realized he can’t do it by himself and has built an infrastructure—including a board and a staff—to help move his efforts forward. The program is designed to bridge the chasm that Finley couldn’t cross—not only getting the kids into private schools, but also making sure they have the background and support they need to succeed when they get there.

  At the same time, Rainier Scholars is not Zion Prep, a school that tries to accept and work with every student it can, no matter their test scores. The Rainier Scholars program, instead, enrolls sixty of Seattle’s highest-testing minority students a year and looks to get them into private schools or the advanced tracks of the public schools. The idea is that without the program, the kids may fall behind and never be able to reach their potential. You have to wonder about the next sixty, who barely miss the cut. Or what about all the other kids after that? How many other talented kids lose out because their families lack the means or the background to guide them through the system? What about the students who don’t score high on standardized tests, who aren’t going to go to college? Have we just accepted, as Doug Wheeler and Damian both charge, that a certain number of kids just aren’t going to make it? Are the Rainier Scholar kids the educational equivalents of Jackie Robinson, with thousands of others missing the chance?

  After lunch, Ronnie and I climb the stairs and walk through the second-floor hallway to sit in on a few classes. There are ten to fifteen students in each class, and I’m surprised at how enthusiastic they are for sixth-graders on a Saturday morning. In a math class, they eagerly work on problems, raising their hands to shout out answers. In an English class, a young African-American teacher leads a discussion about the book The House on Mango Street in a style that reminds me, when I think about it, of classes at Lakeside. When he asks what a character’s motivation is, several students jump in to offer answers and debate among themselves. Unlike many classes I had at private school, the students seem to be actually excited to be talking about the book, not doing it just to notch another good grade on their transcripts. The only significant difference I can see between this class and one you might see at a private school is that not a single student is white.

  Part Five

  Structure and Manhood

  God forgive me for my brash delivery.

  —Jay-Z

  What It Means to Be a Man

  Will McClain Jr. tells me that if I really want to see what his life is like, I should come down to his house on Friday night. “That’s when it really gets going,” he says with a laugh.

  His place is about thirty miles southeast of downtown Seattle, past the city of Kent, out toward the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The road out there runs past several large apartment complexes before the buildings thin out, strip malls giving way to dirt lots. I take a left into a development called Meridian Firs and drive several blocks past single-family homes on small lots until I reach Will’s place, half of a town house duplex. I pull up in the dark, park next to Will’s white SUV, and walk up to the door.

  Will swings it open and ushers me in. He is a large, muscular man, standing about six feet tall and weighing about 230 pounds. In both his athletic build and his facial features, he looks very much like a younger version of his father. He wears blue jeans, a navy blue T-shirt, and black Nike running shoes with a red swoosh. A silver watch hangs on his left wrist, matching the silver hoop earring in his left ear. He has a mustache and a goatee, trimmed hair, and a relaxed manner.

  We sit on a blue couch in the living room, in front of a large-screen projection TV playing the game show Deal or No Deal. Howie Mandel is bantering with a black woman trying to win $1 million. The beige carpet of the room matches the walls. Everything is childproofed—most breakables, such as a grandfather clock that used to sit on top of the TV, are packed away. A large collection of toys is packed in a corner across from the front door, including a basket of children’s books, a plastic dump truck, and a Tickle-Me Elmo doll.

  On the other side of the room, under two African masks, a small karaoke machine sits next to the wall that separates the living room from the kitchen. Next to it there’s a coffee table stacked with framed photos of Will and his wife, Cheryl, and their kids. More hang above it. Around the corner, in the dining room, three of Will and Cheryl’s kids—Janessa, who is eleven; Christian who also is eleven; and Kelia, who is nine—chatter as they play the board game Life at the dining room table. They dash to say hello when Will calls them.

  Cheryl, a fourth-grade teacher at a South Seattle public elementary school, greets me and soon is joined by Imani, their two-year-old daughter. As we talk, Cheryl spreads a pack of cards with images of the “Bratz” dolls facedown on the floor and begins to play Memory—a game where you turn over one card and then try to flip the other card that matches it—with Imani, who has amazingly accurate recall. She jumps up and does a little celebration dance every time she gets another pair.

  Seeing him in this context, I start to understand what Will had told me one day when we went to lunch: “In my younger twenties, without my first child, I could have been in the same position as James Credit and Tyrell Johnson. Settling down for me was a must, an absolute must.”

  Our team made as much impact on Will as anyone—through Randy Finley’s involvement in his life, Will got into Seattle Prep, an elite high school, and then was courted by college athletic programs. Will also shows that the path to adulthood is not only about schools, but having the right structure in place to get through difficult transitions.

  When Will quit the Boise State football team after his sophomore year and came back to Seattle, he didn’t view it as the end of his organized sports career. He enrolled in community college, where he played baseball for a season. After that, Will—just as his dad had twenty years earlier—got into semipro football, which is basically an avenue for guys hoping for a last shot at college ball, the Canadian Football League, arena football, or a tryout with the NFL scout combines.

  In 1993, Will took a job at Zion Prep as a preschool supervisor. He lived at home with his parents and seemed stable from the outside, but he also was drifting. “I pretty much lived a double life before I had my son,” Will says. “With my parents, I was straight and narrow, didn’t show them much of anything. But once I left the house I was completely out of control. I mean completely.

  “Not being totally into a career was tough,” he says. “What do you really want to do? You’re in the middle, and what way do you wanna go?”

  At the time, the drug economy offered a quick way to make some money. When a friend offered Will a chance to earn some cash by making a few deliveries, he grabbed it. “That was the life of my friends and my cousins that I hung around with,” Will says. “It’s not something I set my mind to do, but it started off with, ‘Hey, drop this off for me.’ ”

  Will was twenty-four in 1995 when Christian, his first child, was born. Shortly after the birth he was in the parking lot of a club when someone pulled out a gun and shot another man. Will realized that his involvement in the drug trade meant he might never see his son grow up. He decided to get out immediately. “After you stop, you don’t have the money,” he says. “But I learned to balance my paycheck. I told people, ‘You can’t bring it to my house.’ They started dropping off one by one, and sure enough, li
fe changes. Damian went through the same thing, but he went through the way of Christ.”

  In the meantime, the 1990s took a horrific toll on the kids who only a few years earlier had come over to play at the McClains’ house. Tyrell was killed and dumped in the South Seattle ditch in August 1991. James Credit, who had played on Willie McClain’s CAYA basketball team, was shot in front of the downtown nightclub in March 1993. Sultan Smith, another player on McClain’s CAYA team and Myran’s best friend, was shot and killed at Twenty-third and Union in December 1999. Of the ten guys or so who were regulars on Willie McClain Sr.’s squad, those three are dead.

  For Will, it brought home how little margin for error there was between living and dying among many of the guys he’d grown up with. “You’re talking about seeing James two days before his fatal incident, seeing Tyrell a week before his,” he says. “It’s not like you haven’t seen these guys in weeks or months. It was like days. And you wonder, ‘What could have happened to them when I was sitting there talking to them?’ Or, ‘What if this would’ve happened when we were at the store together?’ ”

  In the meantime, Will’s life gradually started to take direction. At Zion Prep, Doug Wheeler noticed that Will had a talent for math. Wheeler hired a specialist to train Will and eventually made him the school math tutor. After four years of semipro football, it dawned on Will that the break he was waiting for wasn’t going to come. “Professional sports would have been fun,” Will says. “Once I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I got more into teaching and just living life.”

  Will had another son, D’Andre, in 1998. Four years later, when D’Andre—who lives with his mom not far from Will—was in preschool, Will chaperoned his class on a field trip to the zoo in Tacoma. Cheryl’s daughter, Kelia, also was in the class, so she went along as another escort. While the kids were checking out the beluga whales, Will and Cheryl started talking. They were married in 2004.