WILMINGTON, Del.
— The old neighborhood on East Lake Street in Middletown has always been Darren Blackston’s classroom. “My nickname in my community is Professor,” said Blackston, who would later live with an aunt and uncle on Middletown’s New Street. “I always could stand up in front of an audience to speak.
”It’s his vocabulary. The guy’s got a lot of range.
“We had a word of the day, right? ‘What’s the big word of the day, Professor?’ So I would go in and give ’em the big word,” Blackston said.
That was four decades ago when his friends needed dictionaries to track what he was saying. They can Google his big words on their phones these days when he’s in Middletown, his hometown.
“I still live in that community, man,” Blackston said. “I grew up on the worst street in our community back then, and because of JAG and my education, I live on a golf course now. That has nothing to do with being condescending. It’s about the opportunity.”
JAG, or Jobs for America’s Graduates, is a national not-for-profit organization that started in 1979 with a tighter focus: Delaware was hemorrhaging jobs, had the nation’s highest unemployment rate and its second-highest high school dropout rate. Pete du Pont IV was the governor, and he teamed with visionary leader Kenneth Smith to form Jobs for Delaware’s Graduates to provide the state’s youth with workforce development and life skills. Blackston was in the inaugural cohort.
“It gave me hope,” Blackston said.
He needed it. Sports no longer was looking like a viable escape route from a rough neighborhood. Bad grades got him put off the Middletown High School basketball team, and he could really play, too, said Vernon Saunders, Blackston’s cousin. The two grew up together in Middletown.“He was tough on the court,” Saunders said. Not so good in the classroom, though.
“I was struggling academically because of my family circumstance,” Blackston said.
The oldest of 15 siblings, Blackston recalls a childhood run to the store for his father. Dad gave him a wad of cash to go buy a lot of rice.
“I thought the rice was for us to eat,” said Blackston, whose father was a dope dealer.“ The rice was for him to store the drugs in.”
“Home life wasn’t the best,” said Saunders, remembering Blackston’s difficult formative years. “But because of his work ethic and his personality, people were more inclined to give him opportunities.”
“What JAG did for me back then, it exposed me to the governor, to Ken Smith, the people that to that time I had never been exposed to,” Blackston said.
Before long, Professor’s neighborhood lectures started sounding different, Saunders recalled. He said his cousin’s conversations shifted to another level because JAG elevated his interactions, placing him in the paths of people from different walks of life and working in a variety of career fields, demonstrating what’s possible.
“He didn’t have that in the neighborhood,” Saunders said.
That’s JAG, according to Jill Cox, president and CEO of Communities in Schools of North Carolina, which equips students for successful outcomes both in the classroom and in life. One aspect of that is preparing young people to fill workforce gaps in the very near future, which is JAG’s value proposition for business leaders, Cox said.
“In North Carolina and probably many other states across the country, if you look at what our job pipeline looks like today in terms of people who will be ready, who will have the skills and readiness to go into the jobs of tomorrow, we’re tracking somewhere around 35,000 jobs that we’ll have that will have no people qualified to take by the year 3030, which is just five years from now,” Cox said. “So what that means to me and what that means to you as a business person is that every kid in high school, we can’t afford to lose a single one or your pipeline of employees won’t be filled.”
Communities in Schools of North Carolina delivers the JAG model in North Carolina’s high schools to reach young people the way it provided a lifeline for Blackston.“When sports was taken away from me because I wasn’t academically sound at that time, JAG was it,” Blackston said. “I remember my overnight trip to the state conference and being nominated for things, and then it just kind of propelled me to where I am today.”
A young Blackston applied JAG’s framework, pulled up his grades and started on the high school basketball team as a sophomore. The kid was so good he earned a roster spot at Oak Hill Academy in Virginia, which was a premier prep school known for developing prime talent. Blackston parlayed that into a college basketball scholarship, hooped professionally overseas and at the semi-pro level here in the states. He earned a doctorate degree in education and today is a senior-level administrator at Delaware State University. He’s one of 30 senior-level college admins selected to train to become a college president. Slam dunk! Blackston beat the odds.
“In our hometown, there were very few outlets,” Saunders said. “So anytime you didn’t have an outlet and you didn’t have that family support, then you could fall into that trap of getting kind of swooped up into some of the negative things that were happening back then.”
“JAG came along, and then it gave me those foundational principles and tools,” Blackston said.
Ironically enough, Professor from the old neighborhood wound up becoming a professor of graduate research and public policy at Delaware State. It’s like JAG unlocked what already was in him.
“I think it was always there,” Saunders said. “But JAG gave him the chance to excel.”
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photo notes:
Photo 1: Darren Blackston, Ed.D., is delivering a speech during the JAG National Student Leadership Academy in Washington, D.C., in Dec. 2024.
Photo 2: Darren Blackston, Ed.D., is shooting a jump shot as a guard for Middletown High School in Delaware in 1980.
Photo 3: Darren Blackston, Ed.D.