Daily News, E. Einhorn, June 26, 2007

They were smart children who tested into a gifted kindergarten at Harlem's Public School 36 in 1994, but Lance Patterson and Ronnie Rodriguez would each fall in with the wrong crowd.

Lance would be arrested.  Ronnie would joing a gang.

Lance, the class clown of his kindergarten, had strong elementary-school grades that got him into the well-regarded Frederick Douglass Academy in sixth grade.

"He was a little pain in the neck," Principal Gregory Hodge said of Lance.  "I think I met with his mother 10 to 15 times, on the low side."

But Lance was bright, his teachers encouraged him and he looked forward to coming to school.

He came every day, sometimes on Saturday, even after he got into trouble with the police, he said. 

Juvenile records aren't public, but Lance says he was charged twice as a juvenile, once for stealing a woman's purse and once for picking a fight with a stranger on the street.

He was also arrested as an adult when he was 16.  Those records have been sealed, but he said he was charged with a hate-crime assault that he wasn't involved in.  The charges against him were dropped, but not until he'd spent a week locked up at Rikers Island, he said.  It was one of the only weeks of school he's missed.

"Actually, I think it was good for me," Lance said.  "It clicked in my brain and made me want to do better, like, 'Oh, no, you can't do this.  You've got to do better for yourself if you don't want to be in and out of jail.  It's not fun.'"

The juvenile court assigned him to a program called Esperanza that paired him with a caring mentor three times a week for six months.  The mentor, Laurence Fernandez, was the father figure Lance needed.

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