D'Angelo Dean says his son D'Arris is his inspiration for passing the Ohio Proficiency Test. (Brandi Stafford photos) | ZOOM |

        After five failures, D'Angelo Dean will today again try to pass the math portion of the Ohio Proficiency Test. Mr. Dean, 20, is one of 83 people — senior high school-age or older — who took a free 10-hour crash intervention course last week at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Pendleton.

        All have failed to pass one or more of the five ninth-grade proficiency tests required to earn a high school diploma.

        Some who take the test today will fail. Others will pass and walk in a high school graduation ceremony in August.

        Mr. Dean believes he will be one of the passing students.

        For the first time in his life, the Over-the-Rhine man is focusing on just two things: his future and the future of his 8-month-old son, D'Arris.

        He wants to be the strong father-figure he never had. He wants to go to college.

        “I sat down and thought about it, and I said, "I could tell my son that I went back to school,'” the one-time dropout says. “Maybe it took me one to two years. But I did it.”

Intervention course
        The summer intervention course is intended to reach people like Mr. Dean.

        More than 1,300 Ohio students from the Class of 2000 have not passed one or more portions of the Ohio proficiency test required to graduate. Of those, 77 percent — including Mr. Dean — have one test to pass.

Dean walks across Liberty Street on his way home from studying. | ZOOM |

        The state department of education does not require the 10-hour intervention course for students who only need to pass one or more of the proficiency tests to graduate. By week's end, in fact, nearly one-fourth of the class had missed some of the classes.

        But not Mr. Dean.

        For four days in 2.5-hour blocks, he sat quietly as teacher Sharon Elliott reviewed math equations, discussed fractions and quizzed students on percentages.

        While some students giggled, cracked jokes and flirted with their neighbors during Thursday's class, Mr. Dean sat alone at his desk with his head bowed over the blue pre-test booklet. He scribbled on his worksheets and took notes for later referral.

Getting serious
        For Mr. Dean, the test represents a way out.

        As the second of five children, he spent his youth helping to care for his younger brother and sisters in Over-the-Rhine. His mother, Jacqueline Daniels, works two full-time jobs to support her family. Mr. Dean can't remember when his father last lived with him.

        “He's a good kid. He does anything I ask him,” his mother says.

        But life sometimes interfered with achievement for the former Taft High School basketball point guard.

        Between the first time he took the test (March 1998) and the second time (October 1999), his stepmother died of an unexpected illness.

        By the third time he took the test (October 2000), he was one-on-one against the test. The roaring crowd that had cheered as he snaked down the basketball court for the past three years had faded.

        Mr. Dean earned he couldn't play basketball anymore — something at which he thought he excelled — because he was too old.

        Mr. Dean had been concentrating too much on a girl he dated for two years. A girl he loved. A girl who was about to have his baby.

        And there were other things.

        The responsibility of holding down a job at a nursing home. He was behind in school. He was ready to give up and even dropped out of school right before his son was born in November. Some people told him he didn't measure up.

        But then everything changed.

        He and his girlfriend broke up nearly two months ago. The opportunity came to take the intervention course.

        “I know I've got book smarts,” he says. “It all depends on if I apply myself.”

        Now he is.

        For his son.<

The crowd returns
        Mr. Dean is learning although the cheers are softer, the crowd supporting him now is no less passionate than the one he knew at Taft.

        Teachers, a principal and his relatives think he can do it. They see a drive in him that had wilted for a time.

        While playing basketball at Taft, he was voted most-improved player in 1998. He says he persevered despite his size, which was too lean and too small.

        Last week, he was trying to rate most-improved again.

        Those who know Mr. Deanhear him say he wants to go to college. Maybe play basketball. Support D'Arris, whom he takes care of about half the week, he says.

        “He's had a lot of responsibility that may have been some hindrance to him,” says former teacher Dolores Crowley, who had Mr. Dean in her career-based intervention program. “But he wants to be a better father than his father had been. That's one of the reasons for persevering.”

        The teacher sat down with Mr. Dean one day in her office in early spring, a few months after his son was born. He closed the door, and he told her he wasn't sure he could make it.

        “I told him he had to believe in himself,” she says.

        Others do.

        Intervention school principal Dixon Edwards says he used to harass him in school when the teen was lingering in the halls after he had finished his courses. At first, the two didn't like each other. It wasn't that he was rowdy or a fighter. He just wasn't always in class when he should've been.

        But the principal has seen a change. Now Mr. Dean calls the white-haired man a friend.

        “It was because he's still trying,” Mr. Edwards says. “He's still got his eye on the prize. And he's got a lot of things in his environment he hasn't succumbed to.

        “You can tell that someone in his life has spent some time with him.”

        His aunt, Rita Dean, said Mr. Dean has been “scrapping hard to get his high school diploma.” Mr. Dean's mother said it's so he won't have to work two jobs like her.

        “He wants to be a role model for his son,” she says. “I think that has shined a little more light because you don't want your child to be disappointed in you.”

        Mr. Dean says he's ready for today. He's ready to for the percentages and the algebraic formulas.

        Whatever it takes to get his diploma.

        Says Mr. Dean: “I felt I was in school too long to settle for less.”

        Mr. Dean won't know the results of the test for several weeks.
       

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