When Children Are Caught in the Cycle, Not All Can Be Saved HUNTINGDON, Tenn. - Patrick Steele stood alone near the door to the locker room. It was a Friday night doubleheader, the girls before the boys, and the gym at Big Sandy was as full as any Carroll Academy had seen. For weeks, there had been whispers of worry about the game at Big Sandy. While blacks make up about 10 percent of the population in Carroll Academy's five-county area, none of Big Sandy's 574 residents were black, according to the latest census. "Redneck City," one of the girls had said as the van turned on the winding road toward Big Sandy. "This place is racist," one of the boys on the basketball team said as the Carroll Academy contingent slipped into the brightly lighted gym through a side door. Adults had echoed the perception, but none of the whispers came from Steele, Carroll Academy's omnipresent security director, a man of straight faces and penetrating eyes, the son of a black mother and a mixed-race father. Always alert to the movements of the players, particularly at road games, he was in his element. He scanned the faces in the crowd. He searched for hints of trouble. But to him, it was not an issue of race. It was an issue of keeping the students safe. And right now, the girls were behind a closed door, gathered in a circle with their arms locked at the elbows, receiving last-minute instructions from their coach and bowing their heads in prayer. They were safe. So Steele, 53, stood near the baseline, outside the locker room minutes before the game, and looked pleased to be there. He let slip a sliver of a smile. Those girls in the locker room? They were not just basketball players. To Steele, they were something of himself. A Little Girl Grows Up Into Trouble The first time Steele saw Alleyah, she was a toddler, all energy and optimism, waving from a front yard. He could never forget that face. Steele's daily van route to pick up Carroll Academy students has long taken him to the town of McKenzie. For a time, about a decade ago, he dropped off a boy and a girl at a small brick home there. Last year, Steele had a new girl to pick up. He pulled up in front of that little house, and when the door opened, everything rushed back. The way that little girl melted his heart. The way her smile stretched like taffy. The way it grew whenever he brought her a gift - a toy, a doll, anything for someone who had nothing. And here she was again, a tiny wisp at 14, her wide smile covered in braces, her sweet side cloaked in sassiness and street smarts. Alleyah. Every year, around 150 students go through Carroll Academy, a school for troubled teenagers operated by Carroll County Juvenile Court. The school does what it can - picks them up, feeds them, educates them, disciplines them, drops them back home. The idea is to give their worlds some semblance of order and direction, and move them back to their home school, wiser and stronger. You cannot save them all. A few will bounce in and out of Carroll Academy. A few will find their way to college. Some will move from juvenile courts to adult ones, then to prison. Most, it seems, will go back to living on society's fringes, maybe get a G.E.D. or a diploma, then live a life much like the one their parents lead. History repeats. Of the nine girls on this season's basketball team, Alleyah is the one who worries school officials most. So young. So eager to show the older girls her street-hardened edges. Fighting. Smoking. So deceptively disruptive, like a tornado on a still night. Yet she remembers Steele - Mr. Patrick to the students and everyone else - from years ago, too. "He brought me a Barbie," she said with an impossibly wide grin. Alleyah, an eighth grader, came to Carroll Academy because of fighting - hard to believe from someone well under 5 feet tall and a three-digit weight. When she arrived, she was so angry that a boy she liked chose another girl, Hannah, over her that she set up a fake Facebook page for Hannah and peppered it with cruel comments. Hannah, now a basketball teammate, had no idea why so many people suddenly turned on her. She does not have a computer or a cellphone.