Whatever you call him, one of the most unlikely characters in rap is turning in his mike.

In exiting the rap game, Jenkins is leaving behind a healthy local buzz, a producer known coast to coast and a nearly complete unreleased album.

But he has made a choice. Jenkins, 33, will soon leave Chapel Hill High to take a central office job overseeing minority education.

He will be on the front lines, spending time in schools across the district and shaping special courses for promising minority students. He will be a major player behind the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school system's No. 1 goal: raising minority students' grades.

And so he is putting his hip-hop hustle to bed.

"I'm trying to come to terms with myself," Jenkins says. "There are bigger fish to fry. And education is one of them."

The new album was supposed to be called "Superman for a Day, Clark Kent for Life" -- a take on Jenkins' own dual identity.

Consider the show three years ago with Bronx rapper KRS-One at Cat's Cradle, the Chapel Hill area's best-known live music venue.

Jenkins was on stage freestyling, dropping rhymes thought up in real time, when he noticed a guy smoking marijuana. He went over and grabbed it from the man.

As Jenkins lifted up the blunt -- a cigar gutted and filled with pot -- he looked over at 9th Wonder, his beat producer, whose expression said, "Oh God, no."

But this is what Jenkins spit into the mike.

Man, be sensible

I ain't messing with that

I'm a high school assistant principal!

As he returned the blunt, the crowd roared with approval.

"Now, I'm sure that after I went off stage, the blunts went right back up," Jenkins says.

"But for that quick second, marijuana wasn't cool."

Much of rap music celebrates drugs, guns and women-chasing bravado, he concedes. But it can also educate.

The trick, he says, is "walking the fine line between, OK, I'm telling you the right thing, but I also want it to be, for lack of a better word, 'gangsta' enough to make the thugs go buy the CD."

Jenkins' in with teenagers is no mystery. Few authority figures wear dreadlocks and kick freestyles. But generally Jenkins isn't Spectac when he clocks in.

"Certainly the kids are aware that he's a performer, but he really kept that compartmentalized," says former Chapel Hill High Principal Mary Ann Hardebeck.

"He could give kids difficult feedback, but always did so with compassion and sense of fair play," she says. "He's a very serious educator."

In 20 minutes during a recent lunch period, Jenkins went from chiding a teenager on the brink of failing -- too many missed classes -- to giving a one-arm hug to one of his favorites.

"Every time I'd get in trouble, I got to hear his lo-o-ong life story," says senior Brittney Jackson, laughing. "But honestly, I look at him like a father."

Rough roots

In the past year, helping and motivating children has inspired Jenkins more than writing rhymes. Teenagers disillusioned with school are his specialty.

He used to be one of them.

Raised in the nearly invisible town of Eutawville, S.C., Jenkins started rapping for kicks in his middle school cafeteria. By high school, he was ready to take on New York City. Instead, at his mother's insistence, he went to Benedict College.

Though he hung with the girl-chasing, weed-smoking crowd for a while, he ended up with a master's and the start of a solid career.

The biggest project of Spectac's career, however, lies buried in the digital catacombs of 9th Wonder's laptop.

9th Wonder -- real name Pat Douthit -- is the underground beat producer from North Carolina who somehow got on rap powerhouse Jay-Z's farewell album. He is now sought out by big names and the underground alike.

"That's probably the most disappointing piece in all of this," Jenkins says. "To have someone of that caliber ... on this project that looks like it'll never hit the world."

Still, hip-hop won't turn loose of Jenkins that easily.

He met his wife, Chiffon, when she came to Chapel Hill High to handle discipline problems with her son, Tauren Strickland.

Now Strickland is an education major at High Point University. His other pursuit? Rapper.

"He says, 'Man, Jenks, if I could just make it like you did!' "

Though Jenkins is pumped about his new job, it pains him to leave Chapel Hill High, as well as his rap career, behind. On his last day, Jenkins imagines he will do something un-hip-hop.

"When I clean this office out," he says, "I know I'll cry."

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