When it comes to survival, the boys in Houston’s dire Third Ward don’t have many factors in their favor. But what they do have is a fiery ex-NFL star by the name of Roynell Young. And that just may be enough. 

By Paul Solotaroff

The kids in this room have seen the bleakest things and learned to look away. Stone-faced and sullen at 12, they are the survivors of the rag-and-bone hurricane that is life in Houston’s Third Ward. A father dead or gone to who knows where, lost to the weed-grown shadows; a mother in and out of county lockup; the ’bangers at the Quik-Mart, pants on sag, .40 autos at their waists. By the time boys find their way to this middle school, they have mastered the pose of false nonchalance, eyeing the walls or floor. But there’s one thing they can’t pretend to ignore, and that’s Roynell Young fighting mad. 

“I want eyes on me,” snaps the founder of Pro-Vision, the first all-male charter school in the city of Houston and certainly the only such academy for at-risk boys being run by a retired Pro Bowler. “Every eye in here. I catch one head down and, straight-out simple, you’re suspended.”

Row by row in the spit-and-polish classroom at the rear of Pro-Vision’s shiny new building, heads tilt up and hands fold. Twenty-five black or brown boys in white shirts fix their gaze on the strapping ex-cornerback of the Philadelphia Eagles. He was once a hitter so ferocious he used to shatter his own helmet punishing tight ends going over the middle. As a boy, his temper marked him for jail till he lucked into football’s sanctioned war. He rarely blows his stack now, but when he does, look out. Young has spent two decades and nearly every NFL dollar he saved turning a storefront hangout into a powerhouse prep, a citadel on the hill for bottom-rung boys who’ve been kicked out of Houston’s worst schools. Emotionally disturbed kids who can’t read or sit still, sixth-graders who can’t do second-grade math — he wants the ones abandoned or deemed a menace by others. He’s made a second life of saving the lost, sanding grief and rage into rough-hewn poise and sending class after class of caught-up kids to success in high school, then college. But Young draws a line when it comes to thugging, and the boys in this room crossed it by trying to start a half-assed gang. 

“You came to this school,” he says, “begging for help, saying, ‘Choose me over the 10 boys behind me.’ Hell, some of you so-called thugs bawled your eyes out then. But here you are now, claiming your little set. You all broke your contract with me.”

He is staring at a kid in the last row, a small light-skinned boy named Jacorey Miller. His hips are so narrow, he can barely keep his pants up when he gets to his feet to answer. “Sir, it wasn’t me, sir. That was my grandma did the crying.”

Young ramps his glare up, perhaps to keep from laughing. Jacorey is a scrappy child who can’t keep his mouth shut. Smarting off to teachers, baiting the other boys, almost all of them bigger and harder than him — he’s a teacup Yorkie barking at pit bulls. If he weren’t so bright, he’d probably have been kicked out months ago, sent back to the dreaded CEP, Houston’s dump-site school for lawless kids. “Son, you got the nerve to try something this stupid, bringing that foolishness into this temple I’ve built, and you think I’m up here playing?”

Jacorey, eyes burning: “No. Not really.”

Young, who at 51 is still built for impact, a hulking 6-1 and 210, stares a hole through the kid. “You say you rep your block? Man, you rep nothing but ignorance. You live with your grandma, son.”

A whooshing sound: the collective intake of breath. 

“Now, I’m not here to single you out, young man; I’m an equal opportunity hard-ass, as you know. I just want you to own the wrong you did. So do the right thing and come clean about it, or dig the hole deeper for yourself.”

The boy dithers a bit, then lets it all out, biting back tears as he confesses to taking part in a crew called H-Town Sluggaz. Young walks over and gives him a hug; the room falls funeral-home silent. “That’s the first step,” he announces to the others. “Saying, ‘I’m accountable for my acts.’ And before y’all leave today, you will stand and claim. Because either you’re with me or you’re with your little homies. You don’t get to choose ‘all the above.’ ”

The numbers are catastrophic, a scandal so vast as to implicate us all. About 20 percent in Indianapolis and Detroit, 31 percent in Baltimore and Buffalo, 34 percent in Atlanta and Cleveland. Those are the rates of high school graduation for African-American males, and the blight is scarcely particular to cities. Black boys of all ages make the worst grades of any group of students, are up to five times as likely to be expelled as other kids, and have by far the highest dropout rate, which seems fated, given where they begin. “We start losing them early in grade school,” says Susan Sclafani of the National Center for Education and the Economy, a nonprofit school-reform research group. “By the time they’ve reached middle school, the gap is so big that they act out to hide that they can’t read. It’s less shameful to say you’ve got a behavioral problem than have other boys calling you dummy.”

There are endless explanations for our failure to teach black boys, but Roy Young hasn’t the time to give them a hearing. He is too busy fighting the rot where it lives, in the nihilism and apathy of 12-year-old kids. With no formal training or advanced degree, he has figured out something the pedagogues miss when they pontificate about black youth: that boys who’ve had their hearts crushed need to feel cared for before they’ll do the work. “Everything we do here starts with the connection between a teacher and a kid,” says Young. “This is so much more than school. This is about making men from the ground up.”

If your general sense of middle school is sag-jeaned boys and tween girls dressed like Lady Gaga, Pro-Vision will spin your gauges. For one thing, there are no girls here — they’re a drain on boys, says Young. “I’d quote you the studies about bringing down scores, but that wasn’t why I made the call. It’s more about giving kids the chance to be kids and not deal with all that pressure.” Next, you’ll be struck by the boys’ deportment. A conduct contract that each kid signs is long and strictly enforced. Before talking, a student must raise his hand and ask for permission to speak. When lining up for lunch, he must fold his hands and keep a foot’s distance from the kid before him. Cell phones are confiscated at the front door, and a boy carrying more than $5 will get an immediate call home. And anyone crazy enough to sag his pants or sport anything remotely connected to thugging — a blue or red bandanna, a freshly tattooed teardrop — will have a withering sit-down with Young in his sparsely furnished bunker of an office. “They have to understand, this is do-or-die, and those are the trappings of death,” he says.

Houston’s other notable charter schools, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and YES Prep, tend to cherry-pick kids who have achieved in public school and have two parents at home (or a supportive single mom). Not so at Pro-Vision, where nine out of 10 kids come in sorely behind in most subjects and drag along with them the kinds of chaos that KIPP and YES committees screen out. To reach those boys, Young has built and trained a staff that works absurdly hard to forge connections. His teachers, mostly young black men from these same neighborhoods who were the first in their families to attend college, pull 60-hour weeks 10 months a year and volunteer their time on weekends and during summers to lead community outings with the kids. Twelve-hour days and one-on-ones with tutors are mandatory for students who lag, and for kids doing well, there are after-school programs in music, art, and theater. “If you’re not in shape, best teach somewhere else,” says Kenneth Patrick, director of Pro-Vision’s manhood-development program and a former street kid and student here who came back after college with a hot sense of mission. “This ain’t private school.”

No, it most certainly isn’t. Just a little more than a decade ago, his schoolhouse was a strip-mall video store that was vacant because someone got shot there. “We had moved four times the first five years,” he says, “and our operating budget was whatever I happened to have in my checking and savings accounts.” Last November, after 18 knockaround years, Pro-Vision moved to its permanent home, a $4.5 million glass-and-chrome fortress on 16 acres in Sunnyside, Houston. Many of its 160 middle-school boys helped clear the site of trash and tires, dug the land for a garden, and plowed sweat equity into the football field that the Houston Texans paid for last fall. Next year, work will start on an adjacent building that will house both a gym and a high school, so that kids made whole in their fifth through eighth grades here won’t have to return to the gangs and gloom of public education in the ’hood. And then, Young plans to move down the academic ladder, opening an elementary school. “It’s gonna take money I haven’t started to raise yet, but I want to close the loopholes for failure,” he says. “Give me a kid and let me keep him through childhood, and I’ll deliver him straight to college, no exceptions.”

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This article originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Men’s Journal