RESCUING LIVES : Joshua Group provides home for at-risk boys
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
BY MARY KLAUS
Of The Patriot-News
A few years ago, Tyrell Harris was a high school dropout whose troubled background included selling drugs, joining a gang and street fighting.
Today, the Harrisburg teenager is a junior at Bishop McDevitt High School, where he gets good grades and is a Crusaders wide receiver and cornerback.
Within two years, he hopes to be a college student majoring in accounting.
"My life has changed," said Harris, 18, a resident of the Joshua Group house in Allison Hill. "I found the true me and am on a new level. I'm happy because I live here."
Harris, formerly of Philadelphia, credits the Joshua Group with turning his life around.
Founded in 1998 as a mentoring organization to rescue at-risk street boys in the city's Allison Hill neighborhood, the Joshua Group runs a home that cares for two young men at a time and has a fund that sends boys to private high schools.
The organization also operates a resource center where boys are tutored for SAT and GED tests and advised on finding jobs. It has an after-school mentoring/tutoring program that partners Joshua Group youths with at-risk seventh-grade boys.
Harris didn't have an easy time growing up. He said that when he was 11, he would carry people's grocery bags to their cars in return for tips "so my brother and I could eat." At the time, he, his little brother and mother lived in his aunt's home in the Philadelphia area.
The next year, he said, his family moved into a "bad neighborhood" where he "got involved with drugs, hung out with the wrong crowd and had other trouble. I dropped out of school when I was in ninth grade."
Harris' life changed when he was 15 and moved to Harrisburg, lived temporarily with relatives and enrolled in McDevitt as a freshman. He went to a McDevitt football game and knew he "wanted to do that, too."
But he still needed a permanent place to live. A vice principal at McDevitt introduced him to Kirk Hallet, Joshua Group's director, and Sally Snyder, Joshua Group's program manager and house manager.
"They showed me the house, Harris said. "I figured it would work for me. I moved in the next day. Within a month, it felt like I've always been here."
The Joshua Group also helps with his tuition, he said.
"It's really home," said Harris, who hopes to get a football scholarship to college. "I share a room with another guy. We take turns cooking and doing dishes. It's good here and at McDevitt. I even have a girlfriend."
He said he wants to help mentor younger boys because he understands what they experience.
"If I wasn't here, I'd probably have a street mentality," he said, defining that as "survival of the fittest. Once you get mixed up with drugs and gangs, you can't get out. You fight to survive and you watch your back. Here, you don't have to do that."
Snyder called Harris "an incredible young man" said she's seen enormous personal growth in all the boys in the house.
"Guys here have so much potential," Snyder said. "They just need the right direction. Here, they can't bring the streets into the house. That means no lying, no swearing, no drugs and no alcohol. I've watched troubled boys turn into outstanding young men. We are an extended family."