Hope and Dreams

Hope and Dreams II: "I like wild things"

Paul is 16 years old. He comes from a one-parent family with a history of abuse. He's in the eighth grade but reads at a much lower level. Still, he recently insisted on switching schools because his teachers were giving him Fs instead of As. Once, he was arrested for assaulting his younger twin sisters. "I snapped," he says.

If anyone needs the system of support that the Durham Scholars program offers, it's Paul Latorre and his family, says Cofrancesco. If only Paul and his family felt the same way. Paul only comes to the after-school program when he feels like it. "If I've had a hard day, I need to relax," he says. So he goes home and sleeps or watches TV.

Janie Latorre, Paul's mother, has yet to attend the program's monthly workshops for parents because of her chronic health problems. She says that she has had bone cancer for years, which is why she smokes marijuana in her house. She says that she is still recovering from a nervous breakdown. The 38-year-old says that some days she feels so lousy she can't get herself out of bed. Like her son, she is a puzzle -- vulnerable and defeated one moment, streetwise and angry the next. Almost in passing, she mentions that she is currently on probation for assaulting someone in a bar.

Since his mother doesn't work, Paul has been thinking of quitting school to get a job. But Janie says that she'd like him to be the first family member to graduate from high school and to attend college. "I want him to know what the world is about, but not to find out on the streets," she says. "That's what I did." When she was 14 or 15, she started cutting school and then moved out of her parents' row house in Baltimore. She eventually quit school, married young, divorced, and then remarried her first husband. Now she wants to divorce him again.

Paul hates his father. He says that his father used to beat both him and his mother. One time, when his father gambled away the rent money, the family was evicted from their trailer home in Florida, so Janie and the children moved in with her parents in Durham. The house, where Paul's great-grandmother lived for 40 years, is showing its age. Most of the paint has peeled off the exterior. Paul shares his bedroom with his great-uncle, who occasionally takes him to see pro-wrestling matches. Paul also likes fishing and paintballing with a 27-year-old friend of his mother. "I get along with people 20 years old and up," Paul says. "I don't know, I like wild things. I'm wild."

He says that he'd like to be a paramedic so he can help people the same way that he's seen paramedics help people in his neighborhood. "There's been a lot of violence going on," he says. Paul lives a block away from Few Gardens, a public-housing project where he and his sisters are forbidden to go. They're also not allowed to leave the house after dark. The cars that pass their house after dark are looking for drugs or for prostitutes, Janie says. Paul hears gunshots almost every night but says that he's only seen two shootings so far. He didn't see his classmate -- a boy he called "Zeus" -- get shot, but he heard that the boy died from a gunshot wound to the head. "My life has not been a dull moment," Paul says.

Paul may represent the ultimate challenge, but he's precisely the sort of student that Johnson wants in Durham Scholars, because Paul's needs, and those of his family, are so great. Paul and Janie have everything to gain by participating. Each of them calls Cofrancesco almost daily, and she's trying to build on that connection -- by finding a lawyer who will help Janie with her divorce at no charge; by looking for a part-time job at a computer lab for Paul, since he enjoys repairing computers; by convincing him that he's legally too young to drop out of school. (He must be 18.) Cofrancesco says that she'll do anything she can to engage him or to stabilize his life at home.

The important thing to remember, according to Hester-Stephens, program director of Durham Scholars, is that time is on her side. "We have six years to offer these children a support system, to serve as positive role models, and to provide guidance," she says. Already, she has seen some "360-degree turnarounds." One boy, who had the worst temper that she had ever encountered, matured into a well-mannered young man.

Paul Latorre could be next.