Dan Rhoton’s Big, Audacious Plan to End Poverty

A dozen years ago, Dan Rhoton was walking down a street in North Philly when he heard someone calling: “Mr. Rhoton! Mr. Rhoton!”

He turned and saw Marcus, a student who’d graduated a year before from St. Gabriel’s Hall, a juvenile detention facility in Audubon where Rhoton had taught math for 15 years. Rhoton describes himself as looking like “a wimpy version of Harry Potter, with a squeaky voice,” but he’d connected with Marcus and his other challenging students. Now Marcus left a group of guys on a corner and came running up to say hello. Suddenly, the victory of seeing him finish high school seemed utterly hollow: A kid who’d done everything Rhoton had demanded of him, Marcus hadn’t found a job after graduating. He was a teenager with a rap sheet, and he was back on the streets — back, Rhoton saw immediately, to selling drugs in North Philly.

Which started Rhoton on something of a trek. First, he went back to St. Gabriel’s that day, a Saturday, and started pulling files on other recent graduates, calling them, messaging them on Facebook, digging into what they were up to now. Rhoton quickly discovered that there were a lot of Marcuses out there, that an alarming number of them were also jobless and getting into trouble once again.

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