It’s certainly not that Tyrice Jenkins, 18, is lazy.
Valedictorians aren’t lazy. Especially one like Tyrice, who had to switch high schools his senior year – from the Wellston School District to Normandy – yet still graduated with the best grades in the school.
Yet some people confuse Tyrice’s laid-back nature and aversion to stress as being languid, he said.
In December 2009, Tyrice did not bat an eye when the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) made the decision to dismantle the state’s lowest-performing school district, Wellston, and have the Normandy School District absorb its students.
While some Wellston students said they would rather drop out than go to Normandy, he left himself open to opportunity. Despite the media hype, there was never any hostility between Wellston and Normandy students, he said. Some attribute this cool transition to students like Tyrice.
“I wasn’t that worried about it,” he said. “At the end of the day, we are all going to be students. We all going to be taking classes, talking about teachers. We are going to find that commonality to unify.”
By the end of the school year, the cafeteria went from a clump of Wellston students sitting in one corner to all the students mingling together, he said.
On May 19, Tyrice gave his valedictorian speech to this united class and graduated with a 3.94 grade point average. He wrote the speech around a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “You don’t have to climb that whole staircase; you just have to take that first step.”
“I took that to mean: some things may seem impossible to reach, but don’t ever let that stop you from trying,” he said. “Until you take that first step, it just gets shorter from there.”
Senior-class counselor Preston Thomas remembers talking with Tyrice at Wellston and thinking he was the rainmaker who would make this transition work.
Preston said, “He is the best that came out of that high school, and now he is saying, ‘I can go into any environment and make it work.’ He is representing a community.”
For Tyrice, representing his community is like representing his family, not a crime-stricken neighborhood that the media often portrays.
“A lot of people like to talk about how dangerous Wellston is, but I thought it was safe to me,” Jenkins said. “Everyone who lives in Wellston pretty much went to the school district. By being in the school district all my life, I knew everyone. We are a family because we are so small.”
People in the community know and adore his mother. When Dora Jenkins wants to go outside, she blares her gospel music louder than any rap music. She sits on the porch with her sunglasses and shouts from her chair and dances.
“You can hear it from five houses down,” he said.
His dad is just the opposite. Sylvester Jenkins is a man of few words, and he doesn’t visibly get too excited about anything particular, Tyrice said. In fact, the first time Tyrice remembers his father hugging him was on his birthday this past May 13.
“He’s a hard worker; he will always be on time for everything,” Tyrice said of his dad. “He doesn’t say a lot, but he has a hard time saying ‘no.’ If you ask him to do something, if he can do it, he will.”
Tyrice is the youngest of seven siblings, and they have all been a part of his upbringing and success. “My oldest sister used to give me a dollar every time we got an A,” he said. “She stopped doing that when I got to high school.”
At Wellston, no one was even close to catching him as valedictorian. But he wasn’t sure that would carry over to Normandy. His sister almost bet him $700 that he would graduate at the top of his class, just to push him harder.
Yet when Preston Thomas came over to Wellston to talk with the transferring students, Thomas told Tyrice that he might start thinking about writing a valedictorian speech.
“My sister said she was glad she didn’t make that bet,” he said.
Tyrice works four days a week at the Pasta House, and his manager Derrick Williams was beaming with pride that Tyrice was graduating as valedictorian.
“I was the one who hired him,” Williams said.
Williams said he makes the students bring in their report cards. If they drop a grade, he drops one of their shifts.
“I see how hard my parents have to work just to keep stuff moving, and I don’t want that,” he said. “I have dreams to make enough money to make a better Wellston.”
In fact, he directed a documentary with other Eskridge High School students about the history of Wellston and how it once was a thriving community. It won Best Local History at the St. Louis International Film Festival. He has also spent the past three summers designing and presenting a plan to revitalize Wellston, as part of a Washington University program led by architecture professor Bob Hansman.
Tyrice has been awarded a full-ride academic scholarship from Mississippi Valley State University (in Itta Benna, Miss.). But he is also attracted to Indiana Tech, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, because of its opportunities in the technology fields.
“When you look how amazingly well this absorption of the Wellston School District has gone – all the credit for it going well has to go to those kids,” said Normandy Superintendent Stanton Lawrence.
“Tyrice was one of those leaders who stepped up and said, ‘We are going to miss our school mascot, our school colors and motto, but we have better opportunities now and we have to move on.'”
