Concentration: Despite different levels of ability, each boy is expected to do the best he can

Les Stewart

Some of the boys are harder to reach. They have incarcerated parents; they live with aunts and grandmothers; they harbor violent streaks. Sometimes their wild behavior sets off chain reactions, sending their peers into rule-flouting bedlam.

In Walters’ humanities class one day, the students huddle and write skits using a single type of sentence. The imperative group capitalizes on Kyle’s comic timing. Their dialogue is a succession of rapid-fire commands shouted by pint-size soldiers: “Get down! Give me twenty-five crunches!” “You give me twenty crunches!” But in the interrogative group, twelve-year-old Lawrence sits sullenly. He’s a football enthusiast with a build to match, and when he feels cocky he can put on the dance moves. But in the classroom his eyes often look glazed and bloodshot.

Walters walks over to Lawrence as the bell rings. “You have to participate,” she says quietly. “It’s not always going to go the way Lawrence wants it to go. It’s called ‘go with the flow.’ ” The young man packs his books silently. “Lawrence, don’t let this affect the rest of your day,” the teacher says. “To me, it’s forgotten.”

Lawrence’s struggles with impulse control are legendary among his teachers. He pushes his way into lines. He takes forever to copy down assignments. He cuts up, then dozes off. But he also asks teachers to write messages to his aunt when he behaves well. And he takes pride in his pressed shirt and tie. “I want to be a gentleman,” he says. That presto-chango personality mystifies his teachers. “How do you go from nice to thug?” asks Walters. “He doesn’t know where his place is.”

Until he was seven, Lawrence had little guidance about his place. After his father died in a car accident, Lawrence’s mother went into a protracted decline. “She lived a really rocky life,” says his aunt. “He would have to provide meals for himself. He would go to the corner store and buy candy and honey buns.” By the time Lawrence came to live with his aunt and uncle, he was malnourished and had dental problems. He had also failed kindergarten and learned to stuff away his feelings, she says.

“He has had so many disadvantages in this short life of his—I can’t even imagine what he’s going through emotionally,” adds the aunt, a cancer survivor who also suffers from diabetes and narcolepsy. “Because I have some illness and I’m a woman, he doesn’t tell me the things that worry him. He says, ‘I’m all right, auntie, I’m okay.’” Recently Lawrence’s grandfather died, and another uncle perished in a car wreck. Invited to the funeral, “he said he couldn’t take it,” recalls his aunt. “He couldn’t take one more death.”

Looking ahead: If all goes as planned, today’s students will be tomorrow’s civic leaders

Les Stewart

DNS’s admissions committee split over Lawrence. The boy didn’t help matters when he got into a fight during a summer transition program. Afterward, “I talked to Mr. Weaver,” says his aunt. “I didn’t beg him, but I told him, ‘Lawrence needs this program.’” By then, Weaver had taken a liking to the boy and believed his potential could be coaxed out by the right educators. “There’s so much about Lawrence that I could just see. I wanted him so badly,” Weaver says. “If he wasn’t with us, he’d probably fall apart.” Now, Lawrence and his aunt ride the city bus forty-five minutes to school. She drops him off at 7:45, then walks the five miles home.

The fifth anniversary of September 11 falls on a Monday, the day DNS holds its weekly chapel service. This week’s gathering features a skit written by Fred Passmore, a radio evangelist who runs a website called christianskitscripts.com. It portrays two co-workers at New York’s Twin Towers. Mike, a Christian, has just been fired, but he knows God has a plan for him. As he packs his belongings, he begs Jeff to give up womanizing and accept Christ. “Sometimes hell comes right up behind you, out of the blue, and swallows you down without warning,” he says.

Jeff doesn’t listen. As the skit ends, we learn he has engineered his friend’s dismissal for his own gain. “Word of my promotion is already spreading like wildfire through the Trade Center,” he says, clapping with glee. “September 11, 2001, is definitely going to be a day to remember!”

The moral is clear: The nonbeliever is doomed to fiery destruction and damnation. It’s a message DNS students have heard more than once.

DNS promotes itself as rigorously nonsectarian. “We are not a religious school. We’re faith based,” founder Moylan says at a fundraising lunch. “On a weekly basis, we have people of every religious diversity come to this school so the boys are exposed to every imaginable religion.” In reality, the school’s spiritual tone has been set by the beliefs of its staff. Weaver belongs to the United Pentecostal Church and has taken students to Sunday worship services. Many of the instructors attend evangelical churches. One notable exception is Latin and religion teacher Nathan Eubank, M.T.S. ’05, a self-described “Catholic-sympathizing Presbyterian” whose office door carries a sign with the words, “When Jesus said, ‘Love your neighbors,’ I think he probably meant, ‘Don’t kill them.’”

DNS’s curriculum features two years of Bible studies, followed by a year of world religion. In addition, science teacher Dan Vannelle teaches the Old Testament account of creation alongside Darwinian evolution, and holds students responsible for mastering both. “At some point, I tell them what I believe: the Biblical account,” says Vannelle, a retired dentist. “I couldn’t do that in a public school. I’m grateful.”

Parents and guardians say they share that gratitude. Without religious instruction, DNS “would serve no purpose,” says Lawrence’s aunt. “Those are the tools that you need for life. That’s what helps keep things in perspective for the young men.” Under Weaver’s tutelage, she notes, Lawrence was baptized at United Pentecostal Church.

The mother of thirteen-year-old Kenneth, also a Pentecostal, finds DNS’s approach refreshing. In the public schools, she says, “you can talk about Allah. You can talk about Buddha. But when it comes to Christianity, they talk about the Dark Ages and don’t talk about any of the positive things Christianity has done.” She’s particularly angry that public schools teach “the theology of evolution, and don’t even consider creationism as a valid point.”

For her, it’s important that Kenneth’s education echo his religious training at home. “I talk to him about consequences of actions like fornication,” she says. “Here, it’s reinforced, and to me that’s important—the relationship with God. Here, you don’t separate one from the other. It’s all together.”

By mid-trimester, everyone’s faith has been challenged by a series of diffic ult events. First, a promising sixth-grader transfers to public school without explanation. “That is a blow to us—to lose one too early,” Weaver tells the boys. “I think this is a decision he may regret. Before you make wrong decisions, I want you to be prayerful about them.” At DNS, public schools are sometimes described as gang-ridden institutions where black and Latino males can lose their way.

Then, one Monday, Weaver doesn’t show up. Over the weekend, he had flipped over a church bus with nineteen children aboard, including Lawrence. None of the kids was seriously hurt, but Weaver landed in the hospital with a broken leg and other injuries. He will not return for the rest of the trimester. Lawrence, who has lost two adults to car accidents, is deeply shaken. “It felt like some kind of dream,” he would later recall. “The bus could have caught on fire. But God put his hands on us and helped us.”

For many DNS students, disaster has been a regular part of growing up. Perhaps that’s why many of the questions in astronomy class concern the end of the world. “If the sun becomes a white dwarf, won’t all of life on Earth die?” Kyle asks one afternoon. Vannelle assures him that the end is billions of years off.

“What if it was tomorrow?” Kyle persists.

For the faculty members, there are more immediate concerns. At mid-trimester, Kyle’s literacy skills have barely budged, and Lawrence continues to misbehave. Both boys are failing multiple classes. Says Lawrence’s aunt, “He is very tearful. He’s even depressed. He knows that he has disappointed me and himself.” Along with nine others, Lawrence has landed on academic probation, with the prospect that he’ll be expelled if he doesn’t shape up in the long run. “I’m stressed,” he says. “I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get my grades up and stop being bad.”

Still, some students are prospering. Several, including Reginald, are pulling A’s and B’s. In Eubank’s Latin class, boys who struggle with English grammar are mastering the nominative, accusative, and genitive noun cases. Twelve-year-old Travis, whose drug-using mother abandoned him to his grandmother, has a mischievous streak that often lands him in trouble. But in Eubank’s class, he pluralizes amica laudat to amicae laudant and often beats more studious boys during translation contests. “Latin is important because the structure of the language is very different from English,” says Eubank. “It requires students to understand how they make meaning.” That in turn sharpens their analytical thinking. What’s more, Eubank says, Latin’s exoticness gets kids excited about learning—“and that can help them think of themselves as young scholars.”