Four hours before the start of his martial arts class, 18-year-old Darrius Isom climbs aboard the worn-out mountain bike he won in a church raffle and heads for the suburbs.

He rides away from the two-bedroom South Memphis house he shares with his mother and his three younger siblings, where their pet dog punctured a hole in his air mattress and left him with only the floor as a bed.

He rides past the industrial loading dock that faces his front door, over the four sets of railroad tracks and past the house where he watched thieves drag his neighbors onto their lawn before stealing their televisions.

“You can hear gunshots in the day,” he said. “You’re fixing a bowl of cereal and it’s pow, pow.”

He rides past the dilapidated, boarded-up houses with overgrown lawns and the high school where he played cornerback on the football team but was labeled a nerd for studying through lunch.

After two hours of weaving through rush-hour traffic, he arrives at judo practice in Bartlett, 15 miles but a world away from the gangs, violence, drugs and the vicious cycle of poverty that threatens to swallow his potential.

He arrives early so he can rest, which usually turns into lifting weights. Practice begins, and Darrius bounces through the two-hour slugfest of artfully throwing grown men and being thrown to the ground.

“I feel bad for the crash pad,” he says jokingly of their landing mat. During a brief rest on the mat, he looks up at the ceiling, his wide smile spreading across his face, and pounds his chest with his fists in a declaration of victory. Not because he’s won a fight — he’s just happy.

Practice ends, and Darrius’ coach throws the teen’s bike in the back of his truck and drives him home. Sometimes they stop for a quick meal, but usually, Darrius heads right to sleep.

“We don’t really eat,” he says. “I mean, we eat, it’s just not everybody sit down and eat dinner.”

Judo is his lifeline to a world away from poverty. But this fall, Darrius has another escape — his dorm room at Christian Brothers University.

The gated campus is exactly four miles from Hamilton High School, but Darrius is the only student from his graduating class to go there.

“It’s seven minutes from my house but when I get there it feels like I’m in another city,” Darrius says.

Perhaps the longest journey, however, has been the hill he’s had to climb to get himself ready for college, and he’s made it this far thanks to a combination of hard work and luck.

Based on ACT scores, the state of Tennessee considers just 7 percent of graduating Shelby County Schools students ready for college. Despite good grades and a college acceptance letter, Darrius isn’t one of them.

In Tennessee, a student is considered academically college-ready if he or she scores above a certain threshold for each of four sections of the ACT. Darrius missed the bar in two sections.

Colleges use those test scores to determine if a student needs remedial work. If they do, they have to pass those classes before earning any college credit.

Statewide, college-readiness is at 17 percent — at a time when the state is committing hundreds of millions in lottery proceeds to provide free community or technical college tuition to every graduating high school student.

College will never be for everyone, but in a way, the college readiness statistic is the catchall for a successful K-12 education. To be college- or career-ready is more than receiving a diploma. It means enough things went right along the way: Consistent attendance. Academic rigor. Early interventions. A support system.

For children in poverty, it’s too easy for one or several of those factors to be missing. And when they are, the burden placed on a student to become college-ready increases exponentially.

“If you graduated from Shelby County Schools, and you got into college, and you got somebody to pay for it, you deserve a round of applause,” Darrius says. “Because you did it all by yourself.”

FIGHTING FOR AN EDUCATION

Darrius' mind is as bright as his alabaster smile.

“The stuff that we learn, my brain just catches it,” he said. “Everything they teach, I understand the first day they teach it.”

But he wasn’t always a good student — because he didn’t understand why he had to be. No one in the teen’s life found success through an education. College was barely discussed. His mother didn’t graduate high school — she was pregnant with him at 17 — and he never met his father.

“All the men in the family are either dead or in jail,” Lakecia Isom said, although she has no idea where Darrius’ father is. She’s now the mother of five children, and left her $10.50-an-hour job a few months ago to look after her youngest children, who were finding trouble in the neighborhood during the summer months.

Darrius refused to be hardened by the violence or sucked into the drama of his neighborhood. He’s gregarious and energetic, dancing more than he walks and hugging more than he shakes hands.

Instead, he fought in judo, a sport he discovered after his grandfather took him to a competition when Darrius was in middle school. His coach, Glen Campbell, bonded with Darrius quickly.

“He makes you want to do things for him,” Campbell said at practice one summer night, a Superman T-shirt appropriately peeking out from behind his judo uniform.

But it wasn’t until Darrius lucked into another relationship outside his neighborhood that the teen began to excel. A nonprofit connected Darrius with a mentor, and they met for a few casual meals at places like Subway until one day Darrius went home and looked up his new friend.

That’s when he discovered his mentor happened to be Kem Wilson III, grandson of Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson Sr. Darrius met with him the following day.

“I came with a pen and a pencil and I wrote down everything he said,” Darrius said. “Every single word.”

Wilson’s chief message: Education is the key to success.

“I really tried to paint a picture for him of a life that was different maybe from those before him,” Wilson said.

Nearly overnight, Darrius cared about school, just by someone pointing him in the right direction. When other kids played on their phones during lunch, Darrius was reading. When his friends went looking for trouble after school, Darrius was doing extra math work.

“I didn’t want to be just smart,” he said. “I wanted to be better than everybody that went to school.”

He wasn’t valedictorian, but his grades were good enough to have a variety of options for higher education. But he didn’t even know where to start until another adult at judo gave him a book on how to apply to college. Darrius read it cover to cover. He relied on YouTube and search engines to fill in the gaps.

“I typed ‘scholarships’ in Google,” he said.

Hamilton High had 580 students and two guidance counselors, with one serving double duty as the athletic director. And like triage in an emergency room, the neediest students were helped first, and those seeking help with a college application were far down the list, Darrius said.

The school is part of Shelby County’s Innovation Zone turnaround program for schools performing in the bottom 5 percent in the state.

“You really don’t have support,” Darrius said. “I had to go find mine.”

Then it came time to take the ACT. Darrius learned what the test was two weeks before he took it. He had no idea why it was important, either for college admittance or scholarships. He scored an 18 out of 36 — his school’s average for the 2014-15 school year was 14.

“I thought I was going to make a 36,” said Darrius, who had been earning straight As. “I’m serious. I was studying hard, I was on it, I’m going to make the highest score ever.”

Christian Brothers told him he needed to score a 21 to be admitted. He went home and studied on his own, took the test again and got the 21.

“Coming out of that school, having a 21 says a lot, because that’s not something that was pressed upon,” CBU admissions counselor Khari Eason said.

‘HE HAS BROKE THE CYCLE’

From the first time they met at a college fair at Hamilton, Eason knew Darrius was serious about escaping his violence-infested neighborhood and going to college.

She told the teen he needed to submit his transcripts to the college — he bolted out of the gym to his school’s main office and returned with a sealed envelope.

But he hadn’t yet figured out how to pay for college.

“He was going to do whatever it took to get his college education paid for without him being in any debt at all,” Eason said.

Darrius knew he wanted to study engineering at Christian Brothers after one visit, where staff members interacted with him on an individual basis and wanted to get to know him.

Eason noted Darrius — who always has his collared shirt tucked in and buttoned to the top — had the rare quality of knowing how to ask for what he needed, how to figure out who to talk to and how to plead his case. And because of his friendly and outgoing personality, the staff bent over backward for him.Once the school accepted him, CBU began piecing together any scholarship that would apply to him. Ninety-six percent of full-time CBU undergraduates receive financial aid to offset the $30,000 annual tuition.

But the scholarships still left him with costs, including books, that he didn’t know how he’d cover. So he sought another route: joining the National Guard. The Guard would cover his full tuition, housing and books, and pay him a stipend each month.

That plan would set him back a semester, however, as boot camp was scheduled for September. But Darrius again found a way. He breezed through both the written and physical tests, outperforming the minimum requirements by a long shot, and was given permission to skip boot camp and start college on time.

So on the third weekend in August, Darrius went to college. He went with a CBU lanyard around his neck and a T-shirt from the college with a white stamp on the back that read “Accepted.”

His move didn’t take long — his judo coach, his coach’s wife, his cousin and his mother all came to help move him away from the house where he slept on the floor to his own room in a college dormitory.

Lekecia Isom said it was the first time she’d seen a dorm room that wasn’t on television.

“I brag like crazy,” Isom said of her son. “A proud mama. He has broke the cycle.”

Eason once asked Darrius whether he wanted to live on or off campus, recognizing the chance for him to save money by living at home.

“He always said he was looking forward to being in his own space, and in a bed,” Eason said.

As the Campbells made his bed with the sheets and mattress pad they’d bought for him — Glen Campbell joked it was the last time someone would make his bed for him — Darrius opened the doors of his closet and remarked how much judo gear he could fit in there. He doubted he’d sleep much that night, or all semester.

“There’s too much stuff to do,” he said.

With the elevated mattress adorned with crisp new sheets and blankets, Darrius made a spinning leap and jumped onto his bed. His own bed.

And he didn’t stop jumping.

Darrius Isom’s life changed the day he won a metallic mountain bike in a church raffle.

“It was like I got a jet pack or something,” the 18-year-old from South Memphis said.

He was no longer dependent on his single mother for rides. He made it to every martial arts practice. And nearly every day of his senior year at Hamilton High, he was on time.

“Even my grades went up because I was getting to school on time,” he said. “It changed my life, that bike.”

For years, Darrius — a smart, driven student profiled in Part 1 of this series — often missed the start of school because he had to walk a mile and a half each way. It’s a problem tens of thousands of poor students in Memphis face daily.

Shelby County Schools fights constant battles against poverty, from students who move frequently to ones who don’t have winter coats. And when the most basic needs aren’t met, it pushes preparing for college to the back burner.

That’s part of the story of why the state considered just 7 percent of students graduating from Shelby County Schools this May to be ready for college. That means — based on their ACT scores — they had a 75 percent chance of earning a C in college-level classes in the four basic subjects.

Even by the school district’s own measurements, which look at state testing and require a student to be proficient in just one subject, only about a third to half of students are ready for college. Another 366 students earned work certificates last year, qualifying them as career ready.

Graduating high school and enrolling in college without being academically ready — which every high school student can now do for free through the Tennessee Promise — means a student is forced to spend time and money in remedial classes. Chances of graduating drop, and the likelihood of debt increases.But SCS has an ambitious goal: Have 80 percent of its 90,000 students college or career ready in the next nine years.

Even using the more generous state testing data as a metric, it’s a steep hill to climb in a district where 40,000 students live in homes with incomes under $10,000.

The Destination 2025 plan has the district battling poverty and slim resources to chip away at the number of students leaving school unprepared.

“I’d say we’re on the road to college readiness,” district Chief of Academics Heidi Ramirez said. “We’re certainly not there for all of our children yet, but we’ve got a lot of good mileposts that say we’re really on this.”

One of those mileposts is a decrease in suspensions, from nearly two-thirds of students being suspended at some point in the year two years ago to around half last year.

Another is the increase in the number of students taking advanced course work, including dual enrollment. An additional 100 students took at least one advanced placement course last year, for a total of 2,205 students.

Another blurring of lower and higher education is the state’s Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support, or SAILS program. SAILS brings the college remedial classes into high schools, using senior year as an opportunity to catch students up after they’ve finished most of their graduation requirements but before they leave high school. Twenty-five high schools in Shelby County Schools offer the program.

According to the state, SAILS has reduced the number of students requiring remedial math by 28,000 since 2012.

But senior year is much too late to start talking to students about college and careers, Ramirez said. That’s why one of the key strategies in Destination 2025 is expansion of prekindergarten programs. 
“There isn’t a ‘when does it start’ with high-poverty kids,” Ramirez said. “It should be starting from basically birth for all of our children.”

As Ramirez noted, poverty can be the biggest obstacle to academic success. Four out of five students in the district are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school lunch.
“It is hard to study and be focused when you are hungry,” she said.

The result is a higher-than-usual need for extra supports for students — but thin resources can leave gaps.

For SCS, a major gap is in the number of guidance counselors. The Tennessee State Board of Education recommends one counselor for every 350 high school students. The county district's policy allocates one guidance counselor for the first 750 high school students. Some schools have additional supports where possible.

“I can also understand there are a lot of children who don’t feel they get the support they deserve, and I think that’s a growth area for us,” Ramirez said. “And I hope, frankly, that the state and the community will continue to have confidence in us and allocate resources so we can make sure every child gets the support they need, regardless of whether they get it at home.”

The resources battle is what drove several districts across Tennessee, including Shelby County Schools, to file lawsuits against the state in the last year alleging unconstitutionally inadequate and inequitable funding for K-12 education, particularly in light of new state standards.

“Most Shelby County Schools’ children have clearly not acquired general knowledge, have not been able to develop the powers of reasoning and judgment, and have not generally been prepared intellectually for a mature life because of the State’s failure to provide a constitutionally-adequate education,” the local district said in its lawsuit.

Gov. Bill Haslam has said the state’s recent investments in education, including adding more than $200 million in this year’s budget, mitigate those claims.

Haslam knows college readiness is a problem in his state, which is a year into paying for students to go to community or technical college for free in exchange for community service. But he sees the new state K-12 standards with higher academic rigor as the key to upping the numbers.

“We made the effort in Tennessee to say 'Let’s make college affordable for everybody with the Tennessee Promise with the free two years of community college,'” Haslam said. “But it doesn’t do us any good if when they get there, they’re not prepared.”

COLLEGE-READY ACT SCORES

Percent of students who scored high enough on all sections of the ACT in 2016 to be considered ready for college:

Nation: 26

State of Tennessee: 17

Shelby County Schools: 7

Metro Nashville Public Schools: 11

Hamilton County Department of Education: 16

Knox County Schools: 24

Arlington Community Schools: 27

Collierville Schools: 46

Germantown Municipal School District: 43

Bartlett City Schools: 17

Millington Municipal Schools: 10

Data sources: Tennessee Department of Education and ACT, Inc.

Michael Leverett strolls around Southwest Tennessee Community College with big-man-on-campus swagger, calling out greetings to fellow students and the maintenance crew, who all know him by name.

Fresh off a study abroad trip to Brazil and with days to go until the start of fall semester, the student government president majoring in business administration spends his last few days of summer stuffing folders for freshmen orientation and printing ID cards for new students.

He’s not sure what he wants to do when he graduates, but he knows what’s important to him.

“I’d like to travel and help people out,” Leverett says.

For all his confidence and successes, the start of Leverett’s college career did not come easily. Because of a low ACT score he had to take a semester’s worth of remedial classes, delaying his eventual graduation.

Leverett, who grew up in Raleigh, said he was surprised at his score. He went to Middle College High School, a lauded program in the Shelby County Schools system that pushes students to take college classes while in high school. Before he graduated, he had experience in a college classroom at Christian Brothers University.

“I didn’t think I would need developmental classes,” he said.

His familiarity with a college environment allowed him to breeze through the classes, and his good grades earned him scholarship money, so the extra semester didn’t turn into a financial burden.

But he’s hardly alone in needing remedial work. Each year, nearly 70 percent of community college freshmen in Tennessee require remedial classes due to a low ACT score.

Schools like Southwest and LeMoyne-Owen College are forced to adapt to the needs of their student populations, adding wrap-around services at the post-secondary level, and overhauling traditional practices like remedial classes that students must pass before earning any college credit.

Southwest President Tracy Hall said there’s no quick fix to the college-readiness problem.

“But it has to be looked at (by not just) our institution but all the institutions coming together and making college a priority,” she said.

‘NO LONGER SHOCKED’

At LeMoyne-Owen in South Memphis, graduating “on time” means graduating in six years.

The school’s education division chairman Ralph Calhoun said he’s “no longer shocked” at how many students aren’t ready for college when they get there. About 90 percent of students at LeMoyne-Owen are Shelby County Schools graduates.

“It causes professors to have to refocus, because when you look at learning, we have a college-prepared curriculum,” Calhoun said. “But when students come in who are not college ready, we then have to look at where those students are and how we can even move them to the point of being college ready before we can even begin to teach them college-based material.
“We have to meet those students where they are.”

Reaching beyond post-secondary education is also a priority for Southwest, Hall said, with the college committing to a partnership with charter operator Artesian Schools on an early college high school, similar to Middle College High.

The school, set to open on Southwest’s Gill Campus in Frayser, received approval from the Shelby County Board of Education in August for a fall 2017 opening.

Hall said the outreach to the K-12 level is part of a conscious effort to “connect the dots” of a student’s home and school life. Progress may be slow, she said, but will be worth the effort.

“It will take time for us to see the results of all of that coming together, yes, it will,” Hall said. “But seven to 10 years will come whether we connect the dots or not.”

RETHINKING REMEDIATION

A year-old initiative from the Tennessee Board of Regents has restructured how community colleges in the state administer remedial work. Instead of taking a semester’s worth of remedial classes, students take one remedial class and one college-level class simultaneously. The developmental class still eats up three extra credit hours, but students are no longer having to plow through months or even years of classes before earning college credit. Hall said the change has cut down how much remedial work students require, and 51 percent of students statewide who took both developmental and college-level math simultaneously last year passed both classes.

While the program won’t make students any more ready for college when they leave high school, it aims to lessen the effects of so few students being academically ready. The less remedial work needed, the faster a student can graduate and the more likely they are to finish school.

According to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, just 28 percent of students who require remedial work go on to earn a degree, compared with 43 percent who don’t require remedial classes.
But too many times, Hall said, life gets in the way, and students are left with choices, or unsure of how to navigate through rough patches of their lives.

That’s why the college is looking to expand its services, including a plan to add at least two mental health counselors to the staff.

A more intense advising program specifically for male African American students has also helped with retention, Hall said, but it has limited funding through a grant.

“If we can find a way to take those best practices in those models and take them to scale, I think we will see greater success,” she said.

Stephanie Ibanez is barely a few words into describing her experience at Kirby High School in Memphis when the tears begin.

The 18-year-old explains gang members tormented her throughout freshman year, turning school into a dreaded place instead of a safe one.

But the tears aren’t from grief.

“I just remembered how far I came from that,” she says from a lounge chair inside the library at Southwest Tennessee Community College.

Ibanez got back on track academically in high school, but a low ACT score meant she would need remedial classes once she got to college.

A relatively new statewide initiative gave her the chance to catch up completely.

Ibanez is one of 88 students who spent three weeks in July at Southwest in a summer bridge program through the Tennessee Promise, where she tested out of the lower-level classes and was able to start earning college credit immediately when the semester began.

The Promise, part of Gov. Bill Haslam’s Drive to 55 initiative for 55 percent of Tennessee residents to earn a college degree or work certificate, uses lottery proceeds to send any graduating high school student in the state to community or technical college for free. Students must complete community service and participate in a mentoring program.

But the state launched the program at a time when just 17 percent of students in Tennessee are considered ready for college. In Shelby County Schools, the number is just 7 percent.

Test scores aren’t absolute predictors of future success, but they will land students in remedial classes, which can mean college takes longer — possibly beyond the five semesters the Promise covers.

Mike Krause, Haslam’s first executive director of the Promise who is now the head of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said the college readiness problem is why the state has pushed several new initiatives, including the summer bridge program.

“We can have all the financial incentives in the world for students to go to college, but if they’re not prepared to succeed when they get there, we’ve still got a significant problem,” he said.

A NATIONAL EXAMPLE

Several years of Promise data will be necessary for a full assessment on whether enough supports are in place for the initiative to work on such a large scale. But so far, state officials are pleased that four out of five students stayed in the program from the first semester to the second. A full year’s worth of data is set for release this fall, including retention and how many students maintained the required 2.0 grade point average.

On a national level, Tennessee has set an example for states and cities looking to replicate the Promise.

U.S. Undersecretary for Higher Education Ted Mitchell says it’s a positive example, despite the low college readiness numbers in the state.

“I think it’s important that Tennessee has essentially put the horse before the cart on this one and said we need to make it possible for every Tennessean to be able to aspire to a free community college education,” Mitchell said. “And that horse, that aspiration, is going to pull the rest of the system along with it.”

But critics point out the Tennessee Promise is a last-dollar scholarship. That means it only kicks in if a student doesn’t qualify for federal aid or any other scholarship.

For most Memphis students, the substantial majority of whom qualify for Pell Grants for low-income students, community college was already free. For academically successful students, the HOPE Scholarship also covers college.

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, expressed concerns that the Promise takes money away from the HOPE Scholarship, which gives students an incentive to do well to earn free college, and doesn’t do much to help lower-income students who already qualified for Pell grants.

“They just kind of rolled it out and nobody questioned it,” Cohen said.

Krause said although Pell grants serve most of the low-income population, it’s not the same as saying anyone can go to college for free, regardless of academic successes or family income.

It’s easy to tell a student to go to college, he said, “But if that student doesn’t have a real vision that college is a possibility for them, it’s not going to work. And I think the Tennessee Promise plays a powerful role there in changing how students think about their own futures.”

It’s an expensive marketing campaign — Tennessee has set aside more than $300 million in lottery proceeds. But per state law, the government is limited in how it can spend those dollars.

Krause said the Promise is also about more than money. Even if a student isn’t receiving Promise dollars, they can still be a part of the program and have a mentor.

“You’ve got a mentor, you’re performing community service and you have to attend full time,” Krause said. “And those are the things, especially the full time attendance, that make such a difference in the success rates at community colleges.”

TOUGH LOVE

Claire Brulatour knows exactly how many students are in her summer bridge program and knows when one of them is missing.

“She texts us every morning, and if we’re not here, we’re getting a text message — ‘Why aren’t you here?’” rising Southwest first-year student Bria Ford said.

Brulatour, a 28-year-old Christian Brothers University graduate, gives every student she meets her cell phone number each year. About 16,000 kids can reach her any time, day or night —and they do.

“We want them to know that they have resources available, they have people that have the answers,” she said.

Brulatour is the regional coordinator for Tennessee Achieves, the mentoring arm of the Tennessee Promise.

Anyone in Tennessee who is over the age of 21 and passes a background check can sign up to be a mentor. (To apply, go to https://tnachieves.org/mentors/requirements/) tnAchieves, which started in 2008, holds training sessions for the mentors where they learn how to answer a student’s questions and help them navigate their application and admissions process. But mostly, they offer gentle reminders for deadlines and are not expected to have daily communication with their students.

Ford, a Tennessee Promise student in the summer bridge program, said she’s spoken with her assigned mentor, but only a few times.

“Miss Claire has helped more than my mentor,” she said.

Brulatour wants to make sure by the time they start college, that daily contact isn’t needed. She knows many of the students in her program haven’t been pushed in high school like they will be in college. Her goal over the three weeks is not just to have students test out of remedial work, but to get used to life on a college campus.

That means harping on students who don’t show up to let them know that won’t be tolerated once college classes begin. She views it not as hand-holding, but tough love.
“It sounds a little harsh, but I want them to learn the lesson of accountability,” she said.

For Ford, the Promise is a path to a career as an ultrasound technician, and the summer bridge program was her first test balancing responsibilities of work and college classes. She attended classes in the morning and early afternoon and then went to her job at Five Guys Burgers and Fries.

“I might get a couple hours of sleep,” she said.

But to graduate on time, she said, it’s worth the loss of sleep for a few weeks.

“Five Guys will always be there,” Ford said. “My education won’t.”

BY THE NUMBERS

The Promise enrolled 16,291 members in its first year, creating an almost 25 percent increase in community college enrollment and 20 percent increase at the state’s technical colleges. The overall rate of students choosing college after high school increased 4.6 percent.

Source: tnAchieves