Quentin Blair could have been a dropout. Instead, he’s at college to be a teacher.

Like thousands of young adults across the state, 19-year-old Quentin Blair is settling into a new dorm room, meeting his suitemates and starting another year of college.

Unlike many of them, he takes none of it for granted. The 2014 West Charlotte High grad faced steep odds against getting this far: He failed half his classes his first year of high school, and when he got back on track academically, his home life was literally snatched away.

So Blair isn’t rattled by challenges like sorting out transfer credits from his switch from Livingstone College to N.C. Central University.

“If you keep working hard and moving forward,” he says, “you can turn your struggles into success.”

Meanwhile, thousands of adults who volunteer and work in schools prepare for another year trying to connect with teens like Blair.

In the big picture, their work can seem like trying to fight the tide. Wholesale turnaround has proven elusive, despite wave after wave of reform efforts at West Charlotte High and schools like it across America.

Blair serves as a reminder that despite the statistics, individual lives do change. And often an adult who reaches out makes all the difference.

In Blair’s case, help came from his church, the YMCA and faculty at a school Blair’s grandmother initially worried about.

Michael DeVaul, an executive at the YMCA of Greater Charlotte, says Blair’s gift lies in seizing every opportunity he encounters.

“He has really embraced the world,” DeVaul says, “and the world has embraced him.”

Grandmother ‘doesn’t play’

Blair likes to highlight the positive side of his life.

His parents didn’t raise him and his three older siblings, he says, but they stayed involved in his life.

The grandmother who acted as their parent didn’t have much money or education, but she gave them a loving home in the Lockwood neighborhood off North Tryon Street. And when it came to education and church, Blair recalls with a smile, “she doesn’t play.”

Elise Blair, 72, says she walked, took a bus or paid a taxi to make sure she got to her grandson’s schools on a regular basis.

“You’ve got to know who your child is being in school with, hanging around on the playground with. At lunch time, you’ve got to see who your child is sitting with,” she said.

Elise Blair didn’t finish high school and says she struggles with reading. But she got down on the floor with her grandson from the earliest years to make sure he was learning. She stuck with it as he moved up.

And she made sure Quentin had a second home at St. Luke Baptist Church.

“You got to take children to church,” Elise Blair said. “Like a duck, you’ve got to keep ’em in a line behind you.”

Dr. Ophelia Garmon-Brown, a senior vice president at Novant Health, also attends St. Luke. When Quentin was about 12, she recalls, he stumbled over some words when reading a Scripture passage during the early service. She asked him to go to breakfast and coached him on the unfamiliar terms so he could do better during the later service.

“He wants to listen and learn. He’s like a sponge,” Garmon-Brown said. “We just started up a relationship.”

Failure and eviction

Elise Blair says she wanted her grandson to attend a magnet high school because she had heard they were better than West Charlotte, but she had trouble with the application.

West Charlotte has a legacy of honor and struggle. During Jim Crow days it was the pride of Charlotte’s black community. In the 1970s it was hailed as a national model for integration. But in the modern era of neighborhood schools and accountability, the school has consistently landed among the lowest-performing in CMS and the state. More than 80 percent of its students come from low-income homes.

It has also drawn extraordinary community support, most recently from the public-private Project LIFT, which is investing millions of dollars to boost academic success and graduation rates. Among the efforts is a partnership with Communities In Schools, a dropout prevention program.

Quentin Blair’s high school career didn’t start well. He failed four classes, throwing him off track for graduating with his class. Falling behind in ninth grade is one of the strongest signs that a student won’t graduate at all.

A Communities In Schools adviser suggested that Blair attend a meeting of Y Achievers, a YMCA program designed to promote college aspirations and build character. He sat in the back of the room and said nothing, but he decided to give it a try.

As he volunteered at the Stratford Richardson YMCA and helped younger children with reading, he began to bloom. Y Achievers provided tutors to help Blair catch up on credits. The program helped him get paid work at the Y and an internship with Food Lion. Blair was elected president of the Y Achievers Teen Leadership Council and started catching the eye of people like DeVaul.

But when he was 16, a call from his sister interrupted his volunteer work at the YMCA.

“What do you want out of your room?” she asked.

He thought it was a joke, but the family was being evicted from the rental home Blair had grown up in. He moved in with church friends while the rest of the family moved into a hotel.

Blair says he swung between anxiety over the setbacks and hope at the future he saw unfolding. He chose to cling to the latter. And he urges anyone else who’s struggling to do the same.

“If one person gives you a no, you go and find you a yes,” he says. “You still have time to mold the future.”

Off to college with new vision

Blair graduated with his class in 2014. He considered a range of college options, but he decided to major in culinary arts at Livingstone College, a private school in Salisbury.

He had discovered a knack for cooking when he enrolled in culinary classes at West Charlotte. His specialty was a prize-winning cream-filled strawberry brownie cake – three layers, because his grandmother taught him all good Southern cakes have three layers. And a co-worker at the Y had nudged him toward Livingstone.

But Garmon-Brown kept pushing Blair to consider her alma mater, N.C. Central. As he kept working with children at the Y, Blair decided he might make a better teacher than chef.

So Blair transferred after his freshman year and enrolled in N.C. Central as an elementary education major. DeVaul notes that Blair still owed almost $5,000 to Livingstone, but he worked with the school and his mentors to get it paid off.

“He has a ‘no excuses,’ resilient attitude that allows him to plow through any barrier without reservation nor apology,” DeVaul said.

On Thursday, Garmon-Brown drove Quentin and Elise Blair to Durham for move-in day.

Quentin Blair admits to being a bit nervous about a new school. But neither he nor the people who know him doubt he’ll graduate and excel as a teacher.

Life, says Blair, “can be a bit heavy. But you can’t be comfortable. You have to look for new horizons and move forward.”

This story was originally published August 16, 2015 at 2:00 AM with the headline "Quentin Blair could have been a dropout. Instead, he’s at college to be a teacher.."