By Bill Zeeble, KERA News
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Dallas, TX – Without him, they might be in jail, or on the streets. But thanks to CJ Johnson, troubled, homeless high school students have a home, and direction. KERA's Bill Zeeble has more on the North Dallas High School security worker who will receive a revered community award today.
Charles Johnson, whom everyone calls CJ, didn't always take in kids who needed help. He's spent his life working - attending culinary school, co-owning a business. Doing something constructive was the rule growing up in his house run by his aunt and mother, with no father.
CJ Johnson: We were well kept, disciplined and always kept busy. Kept busy means you joined a sport, joined ROTC, you're doing yard work, you're cleaning, you're doing responsible stuff.
From his mother - who took in neighborhood kids in need - Johnson also learned compassion.
CJ: She would say these people are going to be here a while, these people meaning family friends, people that she knows just fell on hard times. They didn't have no place for their kids, so they would stay with us.
Those lessons rubbed off. 15 years ago Johnson, who's 40, says he was working in jail security, trying to figure out how to re-direct the teens he saw behind bars. So he took the security job at his old high school, looking out for troubled kids, like Jimbo Pham.
Jimbo Pham: Things at home got kind of rocky, my mom who's single, She got tired of putting up with my my shi* and told me to get out. I was like never doing the right thing, not doing things around the house. I was raising hell basically.
Pham says he had no guidance, no father, no direction. He was 15. Johnson noticed, and took him in. Jimbo says he stopped backsliding.
Pham: I was blinded by everything else that was going on. And I saw one day, like someone took the blinders off.
Jimbo's now a senior, back in school, back at home, after living briefly with CJ and his mother in his small Oak Cliff house. Alberta Garcia met CJ her senior year at North Dallas High. She had a home, but hated it. Like Jimbo, she had no father at home. Her mother worked from 5 pm till 5 in the morning. She saw her mom maybe a half hour each day, and was always nagged. Beginning her Freshman year, Garcia says she always cut school.
Alberta Garcia: Emotionally I was homeless. See a home is somewhere where you feel safe. Physically, a home, yes, but a real home? I could have been homeless.
Garcia says CJ and others at North Dallas High noticed, cared, and acted.
Garcia: You don't' come to school one day. "Where were you? How are you?" You're sick? They text you, they call you, and say "I'll be praying for you."
Alberta Garcia says CJ was her prime motivator, even though she never lived there. Now after graduating North Dallas High - the first in her family to finish high school, she attends El Centro Communtiy College. That's the kind of outcome CJ says he works for. And it's why North Dallas High's principle, Dinnah Escanilla, says every district needs more people like Johnson.
Escanilla: If all of us will have that kind of heart, we would multiply you can multiply CJ a hundred times, a thousand times.
Escanilla says if you show people kindness and direction, chances are these kids will show kindness to others as they continue to grow. Their mentor, their fill-in father, or uncle or brother, Charles Lamont Johnson, will receive the Jack Lowe Senior Communty Leadership award today, in downtown Dallas.