Keith Shields says he needed tough love.
He got it, and in big doses.
Hours of physical training and military drills every day. Orders, sometimes given in nose-to-nose style, for what he was supposed to do every moment. Strict codes of conduct and dress – no cussing, no talking back, most everything done at double time, books carried with your left arm so you can salute with your right at any moment.
Last fall, when his mother brought him for the first time to Right Step, a military-style boot camp school for high school kids who generally have been failures in every other setting they’ve been in, Shields, now 16, said to himself, “Can’t nobody change me.”
The first day, he says, he mouthed off to a drill sergeant and found himself on his knees, with his arms pinned behind his back.
It was the start of a happy relationship – a process that, in Shields’ description, turned him from being a street tough who had been into every form of wrongdoing into something he is proud to call himself: a cadet