Bermuda-born principal Charles Joynes was recently featured in a US newspaper for his efforts to turn around a troubled high school in Tennessee.Mr Joynes has spent the last 20 years working as an educator in the US — the last three as principal of Brainerd High School.According to his estimates, reported in the Chatanooga Free Times Press, 35 percent of the school’s 636 students are gang members.Mr Joynes has been a principal of schools in Tennessee for 15 years.“They have been typically putting me in the worst schools in our district, the toughest, toughest schools and have left me to turn them around,” he told The Royal Gazette.“They would put me in a school and I would turn it around and then they turn around and put me in another difficult school. I told them this year I didn’t want to move anymore, just let me do what I’ve got to do here.”I’ve had the toughest students. I’m looking at pictures on my wall right now of three students who were killed last year, all shot in the head. The last one was actually in my office about a week before it happened. I was telling him I was so proud of him because he was turning his life around and getting out of the gangs, passing his classes. A week later they shot and killed him.”Determined to tackle the problems at the school Mr Joynes recently called a meeting for all students. The boys were sent to the gym; the girls to the auditorium.He asked half the boys to stand and then delivered a sobering statistic: “This is the percentage out of this whole group that typically won’t graduate ... this is the percentage going to jail.”Raising hope in an often hopeless environment is one of Mr Joynes’ biggest challenges. When he took over as principal at Brainerd the school had many issues — gang violence, college entrance scores barely in double figures, teen pregnancies; children who generally couldn’t expect a bright future. He made a promise to the superintendent of the Education Department, Jim Scales, that he would turn Brainerd into a different place; that it would be smarter, safer and more successful in five years.One problem he faced was there were students who wouldn’t try to better themselves even when minimal effort was all that was required.Mr Joynes told the Free Times Press: “It’s not that they can’t do it. There is nothing wrong with their brains. They are just saying ‘that is too much work’ or ‘I don’t like the subject’.“I have children that, I kid you not, if I tell them ‘put your name on this paper, I will give you an A’, they won’t put their name on the paper.”Brainerd High School is located on the east side of Chattanooga, miles from downtown. Its students are teenagers from rough neighbourhoods — the Harriet Tubman projects, Woodlawn Apartments and Battery Heights.The area was once mostly white and suburban. Minority students were bused into the school in the late 1960s and white people left — the faces of the student population and the school’s principals started to look different.It earned a reputation for drug dealing, gang recruitment and violence. When he took over at Brainerd, it was one of the most troubled schools in the county.Brainerd now has the hallmark of an inner-city school, mostly black, mostly poor, many students without two parents at home.Mr Joynes wonders how many of them have parents telling them that something is expected of them.His students don’t see people coming out of their neighbourhoods and making it very far.“They don’t expect to live very long,” said the principal, who estimates that only five percent of the school’s parents are involved with their children on a daily basis.Of the 636 students, only about 35 parents bother to attend meetings at the school.The school’s graduation rate dropped from the high 60s a decade ago to 55 percent last year.This year, although the test scores and graduation rates may not show it, Brainerd hopes to see signs of improvement.The word around the school is the principal is serious about cleaning things up. The school has weeded out 40 of the most dangerous gang members in the last couple of years, and students have said they feel safer.“The root of the problem is what happens in the home,” Mr Joynes said, pointing to generations of poverty.“They have nothing to aspire to and when you have hundreds of children growing up at the same time, living in the same housing projects, they teach each other how to be criminals. The gang starts showing interest in them and shows them love — the thing that the kids are missing the most. They say, ‘we’ll take care of you, we’ve got your back, nobody will bother you, we’re there for you’ and then they say to them ‘we need you to make some money, go sell some drugs’.”Mr Joynes is in his office every day at 6am. On a typical day, he is still there at 5.30pm.He accepts that many of the students won’t get his message but hopes that his belief in them will make a difference.