Stevie Powell pulled his maroon minivan to the curb next to a weedy empty lot in Englewood.
“Five minutes,” he warned, as Dimonte Pryor, 19, slid open the door and sauntered to his house.
Powell, a big man with a quiet voice and the shambling gait of an overgrown kid, didn’t want any delays. He was driving Pryor and Davonte Flennoy, 19, to a formalwear store to be fitted for prom tuxedos.
Powell is not their father. He is their advocate, a key role in the intensive mentoring program that has been a linchpin in the Chicago Public Schools’ vaunted anti-violence initiative.
He waited for Pryor. In the back seat, Flennoy idly twisted a lock of hair.
Pop. Pop.
Powell scanned the street. “Did that sound like shots?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Flennoy, unruffled. “Could be someone putting nails on their roof.”
Pryor came out, smoking a cigarette. He had changed clothes. Instead of his school uniform polo shirt, he was wearing a white T-shirt bearing the image of a young man with a cocky grin in front of a glowing white gate. Spray-painted letters on the back read, “RIP D-LO.”
A car slowly rolled up, its side scraped and a front panel hanging loose. Pryor leaned over to talk.
“Let’s roll, man,” Powell, 42, called out. “I ain’t got time.”
But now Flennoy jumped out from the back seat and leaned over the car from the other side.
“Hey, man, let’s go now,” Powell urged. “We’re gonna get late.”
Flennoy and Pryor looked back at Powell. After a pause, they ambled back into the minivan. The other car drove off. As it passed, the three young men inside gave Powell and the minivan a long, slow look.
His guys, as he calls them, were safe in the van. A short time later, they were picking out vests and pocket squares.
***
Powell’s role began with numbers. After 528 CPS students were shot, 56 fatally, over the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years, then-CPS head Ron Huberman turned to statistics for help.
He hired a consulting firm to analyze the victims’ lives to predict which other students were at risk. The firm identified 250 students as “ultra-high” risk, 20 percent more likely than other students to get shot.
Those 250 were enrolled in a program run by Youth Advocate Programs Inc., a Pennsylvania firm that serves young people dealing with a variety of issues, beginning in October 2009. More students were referred to the program by principals, police and probation officers, and now 333 are enrolled.
Because of CPS’ shaky financial status, YAP’s future in Chicago is uncertain. A federal stimulus grant that provided the program’s budget of approximately $10 million over two years is running out. Program officials say they have been told by CPS that the budget will be cut by 80 to 90 percent.
CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said YAP has not been given a specific budget but has been asked to provide its services for less money. “It costs roughly $26,000 per student per year to operate that program,” she said. “We believe that we can find a way to reduce costs.”
In a letter asking school principals to lobby against the cuts, David R. Williams, director of Chicago YAP, said the program would have to cut more than 300 students and fire 120 advocates and staff members if its budget is severely slashed.
YAP secures jobs for the students and provides activities during risky after-school hours. Advocates work with four or five students each, a ratio YAP says is crucial for dealing with such complex kids.
“These are the kids that we frankly don’t give much thought to,” said Jonathan Moy, YAP’s project manager for CPS. “But for the past 20 months, we’ve made a demonstrated effort to bring change to these communities and these kids. It would be a little premature to pull these resources and pull these programs out.”
YAP officials say the program is working, although statistics from CPS still show a high level of shootings and murders. During the last two school years, 444 CPS students have been wounded by guns; 53 have been killed.
But YAP CEO Jeff Fleischer said that YAP participants have largely been protected.
“The vast majority have been very safe,” he said. “And if we are able to keep the high-risk kids safe, imagine if we were able to get the other kids into the program.”
***
Powell became an advocate for four students in April 2010.
There was Pryor, a gang member given to gambling in the school washroom who was also, Powell found, a keen observer of people and places.
There was Pryor’s half-brother, Brandon Harris, an earnest young man known as Six-Four though he had outgrown his eighth-grade nickname by an inch. While he was not among the 250 students most at risk, he had a history of fighting and had dropped out of school for two years.
There was Flennoy, almond-eyed and mercurial, bouncing on his toes one minute and silent the next. Flennoy’s father was in prison when Powell met him, and he missed 97 days of school last year.
And there was Justin Jackson, whose neat clothes and wire-rimmed glasses gave him a professorial demeanor belied by the fact that he was on probation for a felony gun charge.
Powell told the guys he would be focusing on their strengths. He told them he believed in them.
Harris, 20, at first found this odd.
“I wasn’t used to a person being nice,” he said. “I kind of thought it was weird.”
Powell was not naive about the world the young men have to navigate. Although he’s from a stable family in a middle-class neighborhood in Harvey, his older brother was shot to death days before Powell graduated from high school. A close friend was shot and killed at Cabrini-Green when he and Powell were high school sophomores.
But he saw attributes in his young men that he thought could help them rise above their surroundings — he also saw that they would have to help themselves.
He once noticed a merit certificate for good grades one of his students had taken home to his mother being used as a coaster for drinks.
“Sometimes you just want to go in with a belt and beat the crap out of the parents,” he said.
***
During the school year, Powell’s days started early. He picked up three of his students for school, sometimes having to first call to wake them up. He drove them to three different alternative schools, stopping at McDonald’s along the way to get them breakfast.
After school, he took them to YAP-organized basketball games, doctor’s appointments and movies. Sometimes he brought along his wife. He liked his guys to see how he talked to her, how he opened the door. He saw Harris and his girlfriend, who are expecting a child, pay particular attention.
When Flennoy’s girlfriend was ready to give birth to their child five months ago, Powell drove her to the hospital. When Pryor was arrested for not showing up at a court date on a trespassing charge, Powell went to court to post bond. When Harris needed a ride at 1 a.m., Powell came to get him.
As he drives them around he talks about setting goals, about not getting distracted, about how having a child is life-changing — two of the students are already fathers.
A minister at his church, Powell left a well-paying job as a union gravedigger to work with young people, first at several social service agencies before joining YAP.
He knows the dangers the young men face. Before his year in YAP, Justin Jackson had been shot and wounded twice. Davonte Flennoy had a friend die of gunshot wounds in his arms. A friend of Dimonte Pryor’s was shot to death this past winter. Pryor ran outside when he heard the gunfire, said his mother, Lealer Harris, but his friend was already dead.
Harris knows YAP can’t completely protect her son.
“There are certain places the program won’t pick him up,” she said. “And I’ll be truthful — I’m not jeopardizing my life. I have a 10-year-old daughter. I’m not going to do it.”
Powell drives warily. He will sometimes pick up one of his guys in a dangerous neighborhood, but is mindful of the danger. One advocate’s car window was shattered in an attack on the student inside.
Powell worries that his YAP charges count on him too much. “The guys become so dependent on you,” he said. “They call you for everything.”
But they also talk to him.
“I trust him. And I don’t trust many people,” Brandon Harris said. “The stuff I go to Steve with, I would never go to my dad with.”
When Harris got B’s and a C at his alternative high school, did well at his YAP-supported construction job and then pursued another job to provide for his girlfriend and the baby they are expecting, Powell told him something Harris never hears from his family.
“He said he was proud of me,” Harris said.
***
Powell pulled into the parking lot of New Memorial Missionary Baptist Church, 6844 S. Indiana Ave., for the weekly meeting of the church’s men’s club. His guys were going to watch a video on a Christian perspective on manhood.
On the screen, Robert Lewis, an Arkansas pastor, talked about men having wounded hearts. In the pews, Harris was texting. Pryor slouched until he was almost horizontal.
But their attention sharpened when they joined the older men in small discussion groups. “How do you relate to the idea of a wounded heart in your experience?” Michael Howard, a church deacon, asked Davonte Flennoy.
Starting quietly, Flennoy described his experience.
“One day ? I was riding with one of my men, and as I was getting out of a car, a black van pulled up,” he said. “I see a gun pulled out the window. I try to tell my friend to watch out. But he shot my man four times.”
Flennoy’s eyes were riveted on Howard. His voice rose higher and faster, as if he were trying to outrace memory.
“I try to see where he is,” Flennoy said. “I’m under the car. I’m scared-like. I’m sitting with my man, talking to him. I try to cover his blood. ? I try to keep him with me. He looking at me, saying, ‘I’m good, I’m good.’ But his eyes got to rolling.
“He say, ‘I’m good,'” Flennoy said.
“But he gone.”
He told the older men that because of YAP, he had decided not to hang out with the same guys, that he had a child now; that he had responsibilities.
Howard looked at him for a moment. Then he said softly, “That’s good testimony.”
As his group rejoined the others, Flennoy turned back, stuck out his hand and shook Howard’s.
It was dark out when the guys piled back into the car. Powell joked that they could have left earlier if Flennoy hadn’t talked so much.
“I’m coming back next week,” Flennoy said.
***
Dealing with the daily problems and moods of four young men has been exhausting. On some days, Powell didn’t have time to eat. His wife stashed granola bars in his car’s glove compartment. Once when he was sick, she turned off his cellphone.
By the time the school year started to wind down, Jackson, 20, had dropped out of school and was hard to find. Powell wasn’t sure he was attending his court-ordered GED program.
But Powell felt his other three guys were on the right track. Flennoy and Pryor graduated high school, as unlikely as that had once looked, on Friday. Harris will graduate this Friday.
Davonte Flennoy was talking about moving to Atlanta, where he has family. Dimonte Pryor was applying for jobs.
Harris had moved into his own apartment with his girlfriend — Powell lent him money for the security deposit.
Just before graduation, he got a job as an attendant at a Chicago park. The couple are thinking about moving to Champaign — “because it away from here,” Harris said — to attend Parkland College.
YAP encourages advocates to stay in touch with their charges informally, and Powell said he will. But the idea is to leave students with the ability to fend for themselves. He had spent the last months reminding them that he would not be their advocate much longer.
“I feel like I’ve put something in place, that these guys will be fine,” Powell said. “They are very smart; they are very resilient.”
Still, he said, “it’ll be hard for both of us. There will be times they’ll call and I’ll have to force myself not to be available.”
Late at night after the church men’s group meeting, Powell drove his guys home. On the way to Flennoy’s house in Markham, the minivan’s engine began to smoke. The odometer was at nearly 200,000 miles. Powell has put 50,000 miles on the car, almost all of it on YAP-related runs, in the last year.
At Flennoy’s house, the young man unstrapped the car seat holding his 5-month-old son and took the baby inside. Powell raised the hood, poured in some antifreeze and waited for the engine to cool.
Brandon Harris, who had ridden down with Powell to keep him company on the late-night drive home, as he often did, waited. Powell lowered the hood, got back into the car, and turned the key. “Well, looks like we’re ending our day together,” he said to Harris. “We started out the day together, and we’re ending it together.”
“Like always,” Harris said.
In a few minutes, Harris had curled his tall frame sideways and was snoring quietly in the back seat. Keeping a careful watch on the overheated-engine light, Powell drove the last of his guys safely home.
bbrotman@tribune.com
