SELMA - For most of her 60 years, Jean Kelly was hardly an activist. She taught school, reared three children and managed rental properties in her hometown of Selma.

The past few years, her pace changed. Since 2005, Kelly devoted much of her time to drumming up support, recruiting volunteers and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to start Johnston County's first Boys & Girls Club.

The club, which opened in October 2006, provides after-school homework help, exercise, art classes and other activities to more than 100 elementary and middle school students. Their parents pay only $10 a year.

It was Kelly's answer to the sad tale she had seen play out in the classroom and in the local papers again and again: young people who drop out of school, get into gangs and drugs, end up in prison, or even dead.

"Our children around here needed some help," Kelly says.

Selma's numbers show the need. More than 80 percent of students at Selma elementary and middle schools are poor enough to receive free and reduced-price lunch, and the middle school has had the county's highest dropout rate several times in recent years. Teen pregnancy rates are high.

To create a club to help change those patterns is expensive and time-consuming. It often requires either a donor with deep pockets or a volunteer with the time and passion to make it work, said Mary Anne Dudley, director of the Boys & Girls Club of Wayne County, which oversees the Selma club.

Dudley said Kelly played the latter role in Selma.

"It was her blood, sweat and tears, her vision and her desire to have that program there to serve children," Dudley said.

Kelly's commitment to the task surprised her friends, who saw the low-key Kelly transformed into a community dynamo.

"She is an ordinary person, but she had a vision and persisted," said Terry Carroll, a longtime friend. "Lots of people can tell you when there's a problem and what's wrong, and some can tell you what the solution is, but how many go out and change it?"

Volunteers built it

The club is housed in part of what was once the segregated K-12 school Kelly herself attended. The club pays $1 a year in rent to Selma, and uses ball fields and playgrounds next door at the Selma Elementary School campus.

The design -- with added rooms and walls painted deep shades of green, rose, blue and yellow -- was done for free by a friend of Kelly's daughter. A Johnston contractor did much of the heavy renovation work, and volunteers painted walls and did small tasks. A corner of the educational room is stuffed with donated books and chairs, the art room closets are full of donated supplies, and a game room has Foosball and pool tables.

The staff at the center helps students who are mainly from disadvantaged backgrounds keep up to speed in school, and the center gives them a fun and safe place to hang out.

"We know that from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. is when most children get in trouble -- the hours between school and parents getting home," said Mamie Moore, director of the club. "When kids are home alone, more things tend to happen."

Moore said parents who often struggle to provide after-school care for their children are elated to have such an affordable alternative. For the child members, the club is a boon to both their grades and social lives.

"It helps me a lot, because I can do my homework here, and they have all these books to read," said Kenyanah McNeill, a 7-year-old student at Selma Elementary. Her favorite part of the club, however, is playing pool with her friends.

The idea germinates

Kelly lives in a two-story white house just down U.S. 301 from the club on Ricks Road, named for her father's family. Four generations of Rickses have been raised in the home, she says.

She earned her teaching degree at what was then Campbell College, where she also met her husband, Roy Kelly.

She spent most of her long career teaching for a few years in a row at different schools, taking breaks when her children were born. Later she would pick up short-term assignments. It was one of those, at Selma Elementary School, that planted the seed for the club in her mind. Kelly says she looked at the smiles and enthusiasm of those students and wondered why so many had lost their zeal for learning -- and their futures -- by middle school.

"Those kids were so excited," Kelly says. "By middle school, that light was not there. How do they lose that between kindergarten and sixth grade?"

About the same time, she asked a tenant about two former students of hers who were close friends. One of them, whom she knew as a playful but smart middle-school boy, was in prison for killing his friend.

"These were children who showed a lot of promise," she says. "There was no reason they couldn't go to college."

Snowball effect

Kelly, who admits being prone to procrastination, said she hit on the idea of the club long before she acted on it: "You know, you can't start something like this until all the closets are clean," she says, with a self-mocking laugh.

Finally, she called Town Councilwoman Jacqueline Lacy. The pair met that afternoon, and the next day visited the Boys & Girls Club in Mount Olive.

Over the coming year, Kelly would visit clubs in Florida, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia -- anywhere she found herself traveling -- to see what it would take to start one in Selma. She also started talking up the project with people she knew around town, and donations of time and money started pouring in.

What Kelly jokingly calls the only major project she had undertaken since motherhood came together quickly. With a board of directors intact, the group raised more than $200,000 in less than a year, and the club opened the next fall.

"Once I uttered the words out loud, it took off," she says. "It was that snowball effect."