Derek Williams wants to be a Jayhawk.

Williams, a high school junior from a rough neighborhood in Detroit, said he wanted to be part of the “team spirit” shown when the men’s basketball team won the NCAA championship last April. He uses this desire to stay focused on his goals and avoid the distractions of his violent school.

Having grown up more than 800 miles away from Lawrence, attending the University may have seemed an unlikely goal for Williams. Thanks to his teacher and volunteers at Audio Reader, the University has become a little closer to Detroit.

Audio Reader, located inside the Kansas Public Radio building on campus, records volunteers’ readings of books, newspapers and other material for blind and visually impaired residents of Kansas and Western Missouri.

Williams is one of 50 Eaton Charter Academy juniors who adopted the University as part of a program to help students think about going to college. All of the classes at the school adopted different colleges to learn about scholarships offered through them. They learned more about that college and its surroundings and worked to find out how to get scholarships to go there.

Their teacher, Joni Lantry Kostich, suggested the University because her father, Bob Lantry, lived in Lawrence.

Lantry Kostich said the realization that her father could help make the connection between the students and the University was great.

“The best way to get things done is to have someone in the inside,” she said.

Lantry soon got his fellow volunteers at Audio Reader involved as well.

Lantry Kostich said talking about the University had already made an impact on her students, who often struggle to do well in school.

“The kids are polite, gentle, intelligent — and their lives suck,” she said. “But they want to do good and this program has helped show them that somebody cares.”

Lantry Kostich said in the past two years, four of her former students had been killed in different shootings.

She said life at Eaton was tough, but that she was “often two feet off the ground” with pride in her students’ accomplishments this year. She said her classroom’s connection to the University had made a difference.

“These are kids who don’t normally perform,” she said, “but they do for me.”

Bob Lantry, a long-time volunteer with Audio Reader, said he was excited to get involved with the students thought of ways to help.

Lantry began collecting University merchandise to send to the Eaton students.

The merchandise — including a KU vest hand-made by an Audio Reader volunteer — became highly praised by the students.

Lantry Kostich said she decided to make the merchandise an incentive for students doing well.

In exchange for no unexcused absences, no late assignments and no behavior problems, students get their names put into a drawing for “Student of the Week,” an activity Lantry attributes to the students’ rising grade point averages.

In addition to speaking with campus officials to help raise money for the Eaton students, Lantry began to speak with the students over the phone.

“I try to talk to them about their challenges and try hard to inspire the heck out of them,” Lantry said.

Lantry Kostich took the program a step further when her students became interested in Audio Reader.

Not only were the students thinking for the first time about going to college, Lantry Kostich said, they were also imagining what it would be like to be blind and to volunteer.

“Some of the students just ate it up,” Lantry Kostich said. “They just kept asking, ‘What more can we learn? What more can we do?’”

The students held bake sales and did chores in and around the school to raise money for Audio Reader.

Brenda Bryant, development director for Audio Reader, said the money hadn’t been sent yet, but many of the service’s volunteers were excited to be helping the students in Detroit.

Lantry Kostich said Williams was one of her biggest success stories and on his way to success at the University. At a school where, according to the Michigan Department of Education, the average ACT score for his class is 14, Williams is expected to score between 26 and 29.

Williams hasn’t applied yet, but said he keeps pictures of the campus on his walls to remind himself of the pride he would have as a student here.

“It would be a wonderful accomplishment,” Williams said.

— — Edited by Jesse Trimble