13-year-old finds way to Morehouse

By Rosalind Bentley

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In a navy pinstripe suit too big for his small frame, 13-year-old Stephen Stafford II sat in the last row of a packed auditorium at Clark Atlanta University. He devoted his full attention to his handheld video game.

Next to him his mother, Michelle, watched the stage so he wouldn’t miss his cue. The occasion was a college prep seminar. Stephen, a student at Morehouse College, was to be the special guest speaker. 

In the audience were about 200 African American high school students, full of hopes for college but in some cases low on money and grades. The session’s message was urgent, repeated like the hook of a pop tune: Bad grades kill college plans faster than low bank accounts. Buckle down, don’t give up.

Stephen fidgeted. Every now and then, his mother shot him a sharp glance that meant be still. If Stephen happened to catch it, a sheepish grin crossed his heart-shaped face.

This pre-show routine has become old hat for Stephen. For months he and his mom have gone before audiences to tell the story of how he arrived at Morehouse almost three years ago. He knows his lines well: Gifted in math; began college classes at age 11; doesn’t believe standardized tests best measure ability; plans a triple major of biology, math and computer science; will become a doctor if he doesn’t create the next Google.

Michelle fills in the rest of the family’s story, a sermon on achievement delivered with passion worthy of a revival meeting: With “relentless” parental involvement and advocacy, a lot of kids out there could be like Stephen.

It’s common to hear the tale of a young black child as a budding rapper or sports star. Yet in a country where by virtually any measure, black boys fare far worse than their white classmates in school, Stephen’s story stands in high relief.

Which is why his parents, Michelle in particular, have been so intent on telling it. They say it is an antidote to the worn narrative that portrays black boys as classroom underachievers at best, potential criminals at worst. It stokes the debate over the virtues of standardized testing, and is a reminder that schools alone aren’t responsible for educating children.

Most of all, it is a testament to the Staffords’ belief that parents must believe their kids can succeed and push toward that goal, even if it means taking risks and ignoring some conventional tenets of education.  

The Clark Atlanta auditorium grew quiet as the moderator introduced the keynote speaker.

“You ready?” Michelle asked her son.

On cue, Stephen tucked his game into his pocket, straightened his tie and strode down the aisle to a swell of applause. 

Portrait of a prodigy

Stephen sees himself as a kid like any other, albeit one who is in college when most children his age are in middle school. Even though he lives at home and sleeps in a bunk bed with Scooby Doo sheets, campus life seems to suit him. Between classes he hangs out with his Morehouse friends debating, among other things, the virtues of PlayStation Portable vs. Nintendo DS. Teachers say he’s engaged in class. But when he toys with the lift on his chair so the seat slides up and down like an amusement park ride, they have to remind themselves: He is still a kid.

“Boring.” That’s his favorite word for anything that doesn’t involve video gaming or math. His thin, coppery limbs are in constant motion and his voice still has a child’s pitch. When he speaks his thoughts rush out in a flurry. A reasoned flurry.  

“Emotion clouds thinking and leads to bad decisions,” he declared one recent afternoon at the Staffords’ Lithonia home. Seated at the kitchen table where Michelle home schooled him for years, he and his mother were discussing what makes a person smart. Between crunches of Doritos and sips of fruit punch he refined his point.

 “It’s like this, if you use an emotion to counter logic, emotion is going to lose. Now some people go on a hunch and it benefits them, occasionally. But if you can think logically, do.”

Michelle stirred a simmering pot of stew, its aroma filling the spacious kitchen. She shook her head. 

“Stephen, Stephen, come on now, son,” she said. “You don’t think emotions are important?” 

“Emotion clouds thinking and leads to bad decisions,” Stephen repeated.

Michelle pushed her salt-and-pepper hair back from her forehead. “He gets this from his father,” she said. 

When Stephen shares his story with others, he delivers it much this way: straightforward, in black and white. The picture his parents paint is rendered in shades of gray.

Doing things different

Michelle, 41, and her husband, Steve, 39, grew up in Chrysler families in Detroit. Michelle’s parents divorced when she was 14. One of six girls, only Michelle and two of her sisters finished high school. The family dealt with, as she put it, “a lot of iniquity.”

“When you come from that experience, there are two ways you can respond. You can follow it, or you can go 180 degrees in the other direction.” 

Steve’s parents told him he’d have to work harder than others to succeed. But his main motivation was his uncle.  

“When I was a kid he’d always ask to borrow money from me,” Steve said. “I love my uncle, I do, but he was lazy. So I was like, ‘What is he doing and what do I need to do differently so I won’t be like him?’ ” 

 Steve became an engineer, Michelle a human resources manager. When they married in 1994, Michelle had a young daughter, Marti, from a previous relationship. Two years later Stephen was born. A new job for his dad brought the family to Atlanta in 2000. 

Because of Georgia’s low rankings in standardized test scores, the Staffords put Stephen and Marti in a private Christian school in Stone Mountain. But Marti was repeating what she’d learned in Detroit schools, and Stephen wasn’t engaged. So the Staffords made the difficult decision to home school their kids.

Within a few years, Stephen was wearing his mother out in math. His appetite for it was insatiable. At 9, he was breezing through 10th-grade algebra.

Still his parents worried about his social skills. No matter how many soccer or 4H or martial arts programs they enrolled him in, Stephen never took to them like he did math and computers.

Mom, I’m fine. I’m happy, he finally told Michelle one day. Difficult as it was to do, she learned to leave him be.

Promise, problems

Marti was different. She wanted a shot at student government and a proper prom. So when she started public school in Gwinnett County, they enrolled Stephen in the 4th grade.

They assumed he was worthy of accelerated placement. Instead, after he’d been there a while, an administrator showed them one of Stephen’s assessment tests.

Son, I’m looking at a paper with a C and it has your name on it, his father said. Can you explain how this happened? 

In some ways, the answer was simple. Stephen didn’t like all the noise the other kids made in class. Plus he had been busy talking, trying to make friends.

The episode made the Staffords wonder if they’d made the right decisions for their son. He performed well at home. Why wasn’t it showing up in the classroom?

Experts say judging whether a child is gifted involves more than test scores. It involves examining a child’s entire portfolio of work, its level of sophistication and assessments by teachers and parents. And not every child, gifted or otherwise, performs well in a classroom setting.

Marti stayed in school. Stephen was pulled out. And Michelle, who’d looked forward to returning to work, went back to teaching him at the kitchen table.

It wasn’t long, though, before Michelle was reaching her limit with what she could teach Stephen in math. She would plead with her husband to show her how to work a geometry problem over breakfast so she could teach Stephen over lunch. The quick tutorials made Steve late for work. Resentments built.

Michelle explained all this over the phone one day to her father in Detroit.

You’re right there in Atlanta with all those black colleges, he told her. Why don’t you call Morehouse?

A call to Morehouse

Martin Luther King Jr. entered Morehouse when he was 15. Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s storied mayor, began at 14. And lore has it that during World War II, the college, sensing that it was losing potential students to the war effort, began allowing boys as young as 10th-graders to enroll. These days, black boys are being lost to a different war, one of the streets and low expectations. Nationally they are over-represented in special-education classes, under-represented in gifted and talented programs, and suspended from schools at a far greater rate than whites.

This reality is not lost on J.K. Haynes, dean of science and mathematics at Morehouse. He has seen his share of bright students who have been overlooked.

On his answering service, Michelle’s voice sounded frantic at the edges, sincere at its core. She needed help teaching math to her 10-year-old son. He didn’t perform well on standardized tests, but devoured advanced math at home. She thought he was gifted, but it wasn’t borne out in the classroom. Would Haynes please call her back, just to talk?

“If a mother says to me, ‘I have a gifted kid and I’d like to put him in a more accelerated environment,’ I’m going to make that happen if I can,” Haynes said. 

He called. Based on what he heard, he suggested Stephen start taking a few classes at Morehouse straight away. Michelle panicked. She’d just wanted advice. How could she and her husband put their child on a campus full of grown men?

It would be another year before they decided it was time to take that leap. At age 11, Stephen audited his first Morehouse courses, algebra and pre-calculus. In each he earned among the highest class scores. Then he started tutoring some of his classmates.

Haynes pressed Sterling Hudson III, dean of admissions, to enroll Stephen full-time. Hudson refused; academic maturity isn’t the same as emotional maturity.

Experts on the gifted say it’s important for a child to be with his intellectual peers. Even so, Stephen would be the youngest student on campus. And though no organization tracks it, the number of kids 15 or younger enrolled in U.S. colleges is estimated to be a handful. Hudson decided to admit Stephen as a “special student.” He can take classes, but won’t be eligible for actual admission until he’s 14 or 15. For now, Stephen is taking classes without charge, his father said.

“I don’t think anyone is so confident in his journey that they want to be reckless,” Hudson said. “But Stephen needs to be in an environment where he is motivated to excel with his gift and not just be ordinary, because he’s not. He is a math prodigy.”

How far can he go?

It’s rare that a child is academically gifted across the board. Usually, the talent is in one area.  This appears to be true for Stephen. English literature? Boring. Composition? Boring. Too abstract, he says. He struggles with all of it.

“It’s like a leech,” he said. “It absorbs the nutrients from the host, then leaves, keeps the nutrients and thinks nothing of the host. That’s how I am with literature. I read it and move on.”

Even so, if he wants full admission to Morehouse, Stephen will need to embrace the “boring” stuff. He’ll also have to pass the SAT. Two years ago he took the ACT, but his scores, his mother said, were “very average.” He’s yet to take an IQ test. Michelle wonders: If he scored poorly, what would the experts on the gifted do with that?

Stephen says he doesn’t want to get hung up on a number. But a good SAT score is key to his future. What about that?

Stephen smiled. 

“See, a test is like a door,” he said. “But behind that door is everything else, and you can’t see everything else unless you unlock the door. So I’ll have to unlock that door.”

How far can he go? Morehouse School of Medicine? MIT? Right now he sees only possibilities. One day, though, he will have to leave the cocoon of Morehouse and the embrace of his parents. How will he deal with a less empathetic, often illogical world?

Stephen said he doesn’t worry about it much.

“I think I was taught how to think.”

At ease in spotlight

On the stage at Clark Atlanta, Stephen took questions. Self-assured, leaning back in his chair, Stephen answered with wit and a 13-year-old’s flair.

What kind of doctor did he want to be?

An ob-gyn specializing in infertility issues.

What kind of girls does he like?

At least 1 year older.

What kind of student would he be if he was in middle school?

Bored out of my mind and always in trouble.

Eventually his mother joined him on stage. There are probably a lot more Stephens out there “who just don’t stand up on paper,” she told the assembly. She believes this so much that she has begun a small tutoring service that operates both online and out of the Stafford’s home.

On and on it went until this from a child in the audience: “What about us kids that hear we’re not good enough?” 

Mother and son assured the room that education is not limited to the four walls of the classroom, that there is more than one way to arrive at a correct answer. What’s most important isn’t simply getting the right answer, but understanding how you got there.

A few more questions and it was over. Once more, applause. Stephen made his way off the stage then slung his backpack over his narrow shoulders. Into the lobby and out into the cold air he went, toward the Morehouse campus a block away. He walked fast. He had a noon class and didn’t want to be late.