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The three of them sit around a table on a January afternoon at Schlagle High School.
“Your past don’t matter to me,” Russ Pickett says in an Arkansas drawl with enough of an edge that Schlagle graduate Greg Upton understands he won’t put up with nonsense.
“My only worry is about now and how you’re going to work. The most demanding thing you’ll ever do is play for us. We’ll be on your butt to get you better. Think about it.”
Pickett, defensive coordinator for the Fort Scott Community College football team, shuts his briefcase, shakes Greg’s hand and leaves without a backward glance. Greg, a 2004 Schlagle graduate, waits until his old football coach Mal McCluskey says something.
“What do you think?”
“He’s for real,” says Greg, 20.
“Yeah, but we got some time before he makes a decision. How safe are you? Could somebody roll up on you?”
“Yeah, coach. Any given day.”
McCluskey, 41, looks at the floor and considers this. In January, someone drove by Greg’s house and fired shots at his bedroom. He counted 12 bullet holes in the walls above his bed. I need to leave KCK, he told McCluskey.
“Could you go away for a couple of months?” McCluskey asks.
“Florida with my auntie. It’s my money situation. I don’t want to go there and live off her.”
“You could flip burgers for a couple of months, earn money and come back here when it’s time to enroll.”
“Yeah,” Greg says, but he doesn’t sound convinced.
McCluskey waits, lets him think about it, glances at his watch. He has another kid, Antonio, to deal with. Antonio also needs to leave.
• • •
No statistics exist on the number of young people who relocate to other communities because of attempts on their lives. However, experts say it happens across the country.
Larry Thomas, assistant director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, said relocation provided the only opportunity for these kids to “rebound” and move on with their lives. With good support, they may not have to move, Thomas said, “but it can be risky.”
Teachers and others trying to help these young people often fall back on their own resources and contacts, with little time to consider options.
“It’s more like a victim-witness relocation program at that point,” said Ron Stevens, president of National School Safety Center in Los Angeles.
• • •
When he started teaching in 1990, Mal McCluskey, a tobacco-chewing good ol’ boy who shaved his head and played high school and college football, never thought that when he became a teacher he would be relocating kids. The idea of youngsters shooting one another was as foreign to him as mountains in the flat lands of El Dorado, Kan., where he was born.
He grew up a Beaver Cleaver and never knew how people less well-off lived. But his parents stressed giving to those less fortunate. He decided to teach urban kids. The gangs, the violence. So different from what he had known as a kid. But he felt a connection.
Although he always had people in his corner growing up, he still stumbled. He had a child out of wedlock. He abused alcohol. He learned from his experiences that praying for others was not enough. The people who made a difference in his life were those who helped him directly.
McCluskey taught high school and coached football in El Dorado and Topeka. In 2003, he moved to Kansas City, Kan., to work at Schlagle. If kids gave him hard looks, he returned them eye to eye. He would not have hugged any one of them to save his life.
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