CCFH School-Based Program Helps Young Man Transform Anger Into Ambition
By the time Felder Shackleford reached middle school, he had been suspended for fighting so many times that he was no longer allowed to attend public school in South Carolina. When his family decided to move to Durham in eighth grade, a teacher at the alternative school he was attending predicted he would be dead or in jail in two months.
The move gave Felder a clean slate, and he was able to enroll at Neal Middle School and then Southern High School. He made good grades, but the pattern of fights and trouble continued. “I was so angry, and whether I was winning or losing, it just felt good to be in a fight.” That toughness made him a natural for gang activity, and he soon learned how much money he could make from selling drugs and hustling.
In tenth grade, he fathered a child, which proved to be a turning point. “I decided I would not be a statistic,” Felder says. He started wearing a tie to school, and he got a part-time job to, in his words, replace the hustle money with honest money. But he still found it too difficult to keep his fist in his pocket and himself out of trouble.
That same year he was referred to SPARCS, a school-based intervention led by CCFH clinicians Eboni Lanier and Donna Newberne. “I thought it had something to do with taking medication for anger management,” he says, but he soon learned it was about becoming self-aware, understanding his peers, and developing skills in self-management.
“I honestly had never talked with anyone about what I felt,” says Felder. “I kept everything bottled up until someone provoked me, and then I would just snap.” Now, though, he was learning how to slow his anger down and make the choices he wanted to make. He also found a more productive use for his hands: putting his thoughts and feelings into writing that more and more took the shape of poetry.
He came back to SPARCS at the beginning of his junior year to see what else it had to offer. During one discussion on living a divided life, Felder remembers getting very quiet and self-conscious. “Everyone in there knew I was talking about change but still doing my dirt,” he says, “and that’s when I finally decided I was done.”
He started working 40-50 hours a week outside of school and focusing all of his remaining attention on being a father. He even took a trip back to South Carolina with his son to show his teacher what had actually become of him. Felder entered the U.S. Army in 2008 and graduated from Southern High School in 2009.
Today Felder is married and has three children. He owns a catering business and invests a lot of his time in writing and speaking to young people who are where he was in high school. His first book of poetry – “Untold Lyrics of the Heart, Mind, and Soul” – is available on Amazon, and he is working on a second volume with poems and art contributed by students from Southern and Hillside High Schools.