Young Elginite with troubled past helping teens

Kevin Echevarria stands in the second floor hallway of Gifford Street Alternative School one recent afternoon, nervously tucking and untucking his starched button-down into a pair of jeans.

He'll face 29 of his toughest critics in a few minutes.

Echevarria, a slight, clean-shaven 21-year-old, looks young enough to be a student at the school in Elgin for kids who've had problems in traditional middle and high schools.

He may not be in a gang, be a teen father or have done jail time. But he knows that life, and that's why he's here.

As Echevarria campaigned for a spot on the Elgin Area School District U-46 board this spring, people in the community took notice.

One of them was Lisa Miller, a middle schoolteacher at Gifford Street.

"I was just so blown away by this kid," she said. "Here he is, from our own community, a business owner, setting a great example."

Echevarria, she thought, would be someone her sometimes hardened kids would heed.

The afternoon Echevarria comes to visit, Miller's class is finishing up some reading work.

The class is mostly boys, clad in uniform purple polos.

Some teenagers are slumped over in their desks, ready to doze. Others eye the clock.

But as Echevarria starts to speak, his sentences peppered with street slang, they begin to perk up.

Echevarria, who grew up on Elgin's east side, graduated from Elgin High in 2005.

High school and middle school were what he calls a hard age. "I wasn't the best student, I was always mad dogging, mouthing off," he told the class. "I was that person that people looked at and said, 'What is he going to accomplish? The only thing he does is get in trouble.'"

Echevarria says he never "got jumped into a gang," but that he and several of his friends hung around with gang members who promised protection.

"We took that and we ran with that," he said. "You'd see us walking down the hallway with a certain group of kids. It became a gang issue. And when you're involved in that, you get caught up in that life. You get caught trying to represent something you're really not."

The turning point for Echevarria came the summer after his junior year in high school.

Elgin's Charismatic Church Door of Sion, where his father, Pedro, is a pastor, held a retreat at Riverwoods Christian Center's outdoor camp in St. Charles.

Echevarria said that as soon as he arrived he decided to go for a walk on the camp's grounds. There he had what he describes as a spiritual encounter, where he wondered aloud why he was heading down a certain life path.

From that point on, he said, "I said I want to be different. I'm not going to be that negative person that I was."

During senior year, he expressed an interest in going to college.

With his bad rap, friends and teachers scoffed.

So, when he graduated, he sold Coca-Cola, asking businesses in the Elgin area to purchase pop machines, and then supplying them with the contents.

After several months, Echevarria saved enough money to partner with his father, purchasing Delicia Tropical Cafe, a brightly painted Puerto Rican restaurant on Elgin's Villa Street. The restaurant serves up family recipes - Puerto Rican rice, homemade stews and fried plantain sandwiches - that Echevarria had eaten all his life.

This past year, he began his third business, a Christian event promotions company, with longtime friend Jonathan Hidalgo. And he became the youngest candidate to run for U-46 school board in decades.

Echevarria lost the race for one of three seats, but earned 6,188 votes, only several hundred fewer than the three winning incumbents.

He also earned the endorsement of the district's 2,400-member teachers union.

"He's clearly done his homework," union President Tim Davis said. "I think age to some extent is irrelevant. Do you have the energy, the commitment, the time to engage in the work?"

Echevarria said he hadn't expected to win the race, but decided to run after attending a forum for recent U-46 high school graduates. People in the community, he said, seemed to listen to his ideas and suggested he get more involved. "I decided, why not go for school board?" he said. Next time a seat is up, he plans to run again.

Elgin Mayor Ed Schock, a former U-46 teacher and administrator, voted for Echevarria.

"Here this kid spent no money on campaigning, and people took him seriously," he said.

Schock believes Echevarria's heritage is a bonus for students in the 43 percent Hispanic district. "A lot of our kids need Latino role models, saying school is your future," he said.

So is his youth. "We forget that the ultimate customers are the kids in our schools," Schock said. "We as adults don't always understand their issues."

At Gifford Street, Echevarria tells Miller's students that as minorities and students with troubled pasts they're set up for failure.

"They think you girls are going to be pregnant at 16; that you guys are going to be drug dealers, gang bangers, dropouts, in and out of jail. That's what you're fighting against," he says.

Miller's class opens up to Echevarria, asking him questions about problems with their parents, girlfriends, summer jobs.

"Tuck your shirt in," he says. "Look professional. Nobody is going to hire somebody with their pants down at their ankles, with ghetto tattoos on their necks."

A number of students, Miller said, took his advice. "They went out, and they came back with jobs," she beams.

A few weeks later, Echevarria returned to the class to speak with students one-on-one. One wanted advice on how to make money, telling Echevarria he was "slanging," or selling drugs.

"You gotta slow down," he tells the student. "Earn it the right way."

Echevarria said he hopes to start a work-ethic program with Gifford Street students, offering them some work at the restaurant.

Being a lifelong Elgin resident and running with certain crowds, Echevarria says, has helped him connect with the kids.

"They throw a name out, I throw out another name. They start to get me then, you know?" he says.

The kids ask him if he's ever smoked pot.

"I'll tell them, yeah, I did that a long time ago," he said. "But what matters now is if you change that."

Like Miller, Ellis Middle School English Language Learners teacher Carlos Salgado invited Echevarria to speak to his students this spring.

"I saw this kid was talented. He had a good story to tell. He spoke the kids' language," Salgado said.

Like at Gifford Street, he told his story. And the kids opened up.

A week later, Echevarria came in to work at Delicia and found a stack of letters waiting. The students had written.

Some had simply said they felt connected to what he had to say. Others asked for advice.

Echevarria wrote a letter back to the class. And for the students who asked for advice, he's responded to them individually.

Salgado said he's already made plans with Echevarria to come back to Ellis next year.

"I want to keep in touch, be there for these kids," Echevarria says.

"It's not that I owe somebody something. There are just so many bad influences out there. Who are we going to let decide what our kids are thinking and how they're going to be successful?" he said. "I just feel that it's part of my duty as a person that did something wrong at one point. It's up to me to get out there and get involved."