“Once students find out that they have an opportunity to succeed, they definitely will. If you show them how they can do it, they are going to succeed.”

— Denwood Barksdale

Though he has been a teacher for nearly a quarter of a century, Denwood Barksdale can still easily remember the one student who changed the course of his career.

Barksdale, 52, was working as a teacher at Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center, a medium and maximum security facility in Powhatan for males ages 16 to 20. He had a student assistant who he recalls as being intelligent and well-mannered, “like the traditional college student.”

“I told him ‘You should go to college,’” Barksdale said, and the student accepted his offer to help with the application process.

The student, who went on to graduate and begin a successful career, told others in the facility what Barksdale had been able to do for him, and soon the teacher found himself flooded with requests for help.

“It dawned on me that there was going to have to be some organization,” Barksdale recalled.

In 1994, Barksdale founded The College Bound Program, through which students at Beaumont are offered the assistance they need to transition for life inside the facility to life as a successful college student. Barksdale currently works with approximately 150 students in seven facilities around the state, providing everything from emotional support to help securing financial aid. The program also offers scholarships with money raised from various student-run fundraisers.

Most of the students he sees come from impoverished families, Barksdale said, or homes with little parental support or guidance. Barksdale’s mission is to break the cycle by showing them the path to a different life.

“I have found that once students find out that they have an opportunity to succeed, they definitely will,” said Barksdale.

“If you show them how they can do it, they are going to succeed.”

“Profanity decreases, heads go up, pants go up. It goes from ‘What am I going to do once I get back on the block’ to ‘How am I going to pass my SATs.’”

Barksdale has been recognized on both a local and national level for his work. He has been named an Outstanding Employee by the Virginia Department of Corrections, and received the Virginia Correctional Association’s Criminal Justice Employee of the Year Award in 2003.

In 2004, Barksdale was presented with the Mary Church Terrell Award for promoting activism in Education by the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice.

He is also a Master Teacher, a designation currently held by just 17 of the Virginia Department of Corrections’ 700 teachers.

Barksdale said much of his success can be attributed to the passion he has maintained for working with the students in the correctional system and his ability to see students “not where they are today, but where they will be tomorrow.”

“We deal with students who have been written off as hopeless,” said Barksdale, “but with patience, dedication and loving them, personalities do change.”

Barksdale said he knows there is a time when the message needs to be more forceful, and he is willing to deliver that message in whatever way is necessary.

Whatever he needs to do he will do, he said, to ensure that the lives of his students are not wasted behind the walls of the nation’s prisons.

“There are doctors in there, there are ministers in there,” said Barksdale. “And so many of these kids say they want to go out and be successful because they want to be there for other kids who come from the same situation they did.”

Barksdale related this as he was driving down the road, headed to yet another facility to work with another population of incarcerated young people.

He admitted the greatest challenge he faces during the course of the day is simply being able to stop, to “turn off” and leave at the end of the day.

He related the story of a student he worked with who left the facility and went on to Georgetown University. He spoke of another who had committed himself to taking his SATs while he was inside the correctional center and achieved a near-perfect 1520 out of 1600 on his SATs.

“That’s the type of thing that keeps me going,” said Barksdale.

“Society says it can’t be done. I say ‘Oh yes it can.’”