Building success one kid at a time

DURHAM -- Jerry Lopez looks like a firefly caught in a jar as he sits in a classroom at the Emily Krzyzewski Family Life Center on a July afternoon.

The 7-year-old flits from one edge of his seat to the other as tutor Rachel Stine asks him and Daveion Atwater, 8, to look at surveys they have just collected from their math camp cohorts.

Organizers are trying to figure out how to make the camp better for next year, and Jerry and Daveion are applying their math skills -- gathering data, recording it, analyzing it -- to this real-world problem.

Stine asks, how many boys are in camp? How many girls? How many girl campers like popcorn mix as a snack? How many boy campers like fruit?

The boys shuffle their papers, counting, until Jerry's dark eyes get wide, his eyebrows high, his hand raised, straining, begging to respond. "Ooh, I know!"

This story is about that -- what Jerry knows and what he does not. And how the Emily K Center, which serves low-income and immigrant families in Durham, will help the second-grader erase the gap in between over the next 11 years.

The center is there to help him sort it all out. But Jerry already knows the six skills, called "pillars" at the center, that he must perfect to be successful in life.

Pillar 1: Heart

To Jerry, having heart means dreaming big. His own dream took root when he and his mother, Julieta, met Rosa Peña at a soccer tournament in Chapel Hill three years ago.

Peña works as a Spanish teacher and Hispanic community liaison at Immaculata Catholic School, next to the Emily K Center. Watching Jerry play soccer with his young cousins Luis, Julia and Dayonara, Peña couldn't miss Jerry's energy.

She introduced herself to Julieta, encouraging her to have Jerry apply to Immaculata. He did, passed the entrance exam and was approved for financial aid from the school.

But Julieta still worried.

How could she help her son without being fluent in English herself yet? The situation worsened when Jerry's kindergarten teacher, Diane Gerding, noticed that Jerry wasn't testing near the first-grade reading level by the end of his kindergarten year.

Emily K to the rescue. Gerding told Julieta that the center, which had been open just two months at the time, could provide the extra tutoring Jerry might need. Julieta immediately signed him up.

"That made me feel so good," she says in Spanish before continuing in English. "They can help with his homework, and he can spend his time there with other kids who are doing good things."

Jerry spends weekday afternoons at the center during the school year. It provides one tutor, on average, for every three students. Tutors help with reading, math and sports activities.

Julieta, 27, sees how confident her son has grown after just one year of the tutoring, friendships and support he finds at Emily K.

Son and mother can think big with the center backing them. A college degree for Jerry, what do you think about that? Julieta is asked. She responds, her hand on her heart, "Es mi sueño."

It's my dream.

Pillar 2: High expectations

What are these? "High expectations are when you try your best," Jerry says.

The Emily K Center, named for the late mother of Duke University men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, is a shiny, 29,000-square-foot facility with new, high-tech everything. So each time Jerry runs into a classroom, he can pull up a chair to a computer and work on a PowerPoint presentation or do research or play games.

When he happily struggled to do jumping jacks in unison with other campers at the Running Mates Basketball Camp last month, Jerry did so on the same floor that the 2001 NCAA champion Duke Blue Devils played on.