Boone has no time for doubters or for their jerry-rigged statistics. He knows he’s heading at the speed of light toward success. His accomplishments will say more about him than any statistic ever can.

David Boone doesn’t fret about other people’s expectations of him. He knows when most people look at him they see a Black teenager who has anything but success on his mind.

Boone, a June 2012 graduate of MC2STEM, hates to hear those stereotypes. He hates to hear them because they don’t reflect who he is or what he is about. He flat-out rejects those dog-eared statistics that predict a Black male born into a single-parent household to a teenaged mother is doomed to failure.

“The fact that people don’t expect a lot from me fuels me,” he said. “At times, it makes me angry. I want to prove people wrong… ‘I can be more than this. I am more than this.’”

Boone has no time for doubters or for their jerry-rigged statistics. He knows he’s heading at the speed of light toward success. His accomplishments will say more about him than any statistic ever can.

In the fall, his path to success will take him to Harvard, one of dozens of elite colleges that courted Boone as if he were the second coming of LeBron James or Robert Griffin III. None recruited Boone for his athleticism. He’s too short to play basketball like LeBron and too skinny to play football like RG3.

What Boone excels at are academics. He is one of the brightest minds to come out of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District in recent years. He’s a legit all-star performer in the classroom, which his stack of full-ride scholarships does more than suggest.

But what suggests his intellect even more is the blue-chip academic award he picked up. Boone, whom The Plain Dealer selected as one of the region’s 10 most promising scholars, is among the 1,000 seniors from across the country to win a Gates Millennium Scholarship in 2012. The Gates award pays for their education from undergrad to a doctorate.

No matter where Boone decides to go after Harvard, his costs are paid for.

“It’s amazing to know he’ll be able to go to school wherever he chooses,” said Moneeke Davis, his mother. “Money is not going to be his issue. He’s not going to have those struggles trying to work and study.”

Inner-city male, sickly, homeless, angry, indifferent about learning, defiant… David Boone could have been what the statistics said he would be.

“I was horrible,” he said. “I didn’t listen. I back-talked. I didn’t do homework – I never did homework. There was never an assignment I did at home during middle school.”

But somewhere before middle school rolled into high school, he came to a fork in the road and sought directions.

He got them. He found his village.

Boone credited Mary Solomon-Gatson, a nurse in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, with being the first person to encourage him to believe in himself and to help him see his destiny.

 Others came soon afterward. They pierced his rebellious spirit, built a circle of support around him: an academic counselor, a principal, a school board member and his mother Moneeke Davis – the teenaged mother who needed to put her life in order first. She did.

Now, Davis stands side by side with her son. She’s cheering him on, rooting for him to achieve his destiny. She sees no limits for him. She takes pride in what her son has endured and what he has done.  

With all Boone has faced – with all Davis has faced – success is within her son’s reach.

So Davis, a high-school dropout who later picked up a GED, was nervous about Graduation Day, as if she couldn’t believe it was happening for her son. But June 2 was etched in her mind, along with the mental picture of her son walking across a stage with 59 classmates: the first in her family to graduate on schedule.

“I told him I don’t know what’s going to happen Graduation Day. They might need EMS or an oxygen tank,” said Davis, laughing. “I’m just so proud of him.”

 Graduation from MC2STEM was just another step toward her son’s success. At 18, he remains an intellectual Picasso, a Black teenager who’s working on a still-life half finished. The brilliance of each brushstroke, however, is there for people to marvel.

For Boone, the world is not that straitjacket he wore in middle school. He’s wiggled out of it, freed himself to explore the world, to experience things that poverty, academic indifference and ill health kept him from enjoying.

 At Harvard, Boone plans to study engineering. He talks in the long term of starting a business – a successful business that might give fledgling David Boones elsewhere a place to build their resumes.

  He already knows what success looks like. He’s beaten those odds that said he would fail. He’s proved that hard work, a love for learning and true grit are part of a winning formula. Yet he hasn’t let his winning turn him into a person no one can bear.

“My mom said, ‘David, you’re destined for greatness, but don’t forgot about the people that helped you along the way. And never, never, ever get a big head,’” Boone said. “You gotta listen to mom.”