At Pressley Ridge, ‘Life unfolds minute by minute’

By J. Brady McCollough / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The school at the top of the hill turns its back on no one. The road there is dark, passing the edge of a vast and wooded cemetery that hugs the campus grounds. Thousands of tombstones dot the landscape, stark reminders of what can go wrong if the right lessons aren't learned.

On its best days, Pressley Ridge Day School, hidden in a nook on Pittsburgh's North Side, is a beacon of light. Educators at the state and district level know that Pressley will take each child delivered to its doorstep, and those children have arrived there for one crushing reason or another. It is their last resort. There is nowhere else to go.

No child believes deep down that he or she belongs at Pressley Ridge. Kurtis Haddock, Dante Yobst and Sha'Ron Williams surely didn't. Three distinct journeys, from Homewood, Sheraden and McKees Rocks, respectively, led them through Allegheny County's labyrinthine roads, tunnels and bridges and up the hill that rises just 3 miles from Downtown.

Kurtis was first, in September 2010, a bright and eager 12-year-old with a host of mental-health diagnoses and behaviors that Pittsburgh Public Schools could tolerate no longer. With Kurtis, his exit came to a slow boil; it was anybody's guess when the explosion was coming. A look at the fates of two of his older brothers offered a chilling preview -- one dead, one in prison -- and now Kurtis, the precocious caboose of five siblings, stood alone with the future of a distressed family sitting on his bony shoulders.

About Pressley Ridge Day School

Pressley Ridge Day School is a part-treatment program for students with mental-health issues and behavioral problems. Enrollment fluctuates from 80 to 120, and Pressley Ridge prefers to have one staff person for every three students. The schools stated goal is to help students improve enough to return to their community school districts. Sixty-six percent of its students, or 31 out of 47 kids, were positively discharged over the past two years. A positive discharge is a case that resulted in re-admission to a public school, cyber school or graduation.

Dante followed less than a year later, in May 2011, a 14-year-old shellshocked after two months at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. There, he thawed out after a violent outburst against another student at Perry Traditional Academy that was so scary that Dante felt he had no choice but to have himself admitted for treatment. Dante often looked sad, even when he was happy, and that was usually when he was playing sports.

Sha'Ron's grandmother dragged him to Pressley in March 2012. He was 17, a junior, nearly done with school -- or, in his mind, the act of pretending to care about school so the adults would just leave him alone. Sto-Rox High School told Sha'Ron he could not finish his education there, and so he had no interest in continuing the charade elsewhere. He thought going to Pressley was a stupid idea. He would have rather dropped out and succumbed fully to the same streets as his growing list of fallen friends.

Early in the boys' days at Pressley, staff members went about discovering what activities brought them joy. Each of them expressed their passion for playing sports, especially basketball, and each soon would be introduced to a middle-aged man named Baron "B.B." Flenory.

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At Pressley Ridge, 'Life unfolds minute by minute'