The grim realities a former Jackson gang member wrote about in his book, “Valley Low/Mountain High,” confront many students in Vicksburg schools, said people with firsthand knowledge of the problems facing youths.

A disciplinarian, two Girls Club workers and a junir high school student said the author’s story of growing up in a broken family amid drugs and gang violence hit close to home.

Pat Gray, the in-school detention coordinator at Warren Central Junior High, was one of about 20 people who heard Willie McKennis, an author and motivational speaker who grew up under harsh circumstances, speak about his experiences Saturday at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library. After hearing McKennis describe his years on the streets of Jackson without parents, selling cocaine, getting stabbed and seeing a friend die from gunshot wounds, Gray said many students seem to be drifting toward the lifestyle McKennis escaped.

“A lot. A whole lot,” Gray said when asked how many of the seventh and eighth graders she sees — in the halls, at football games and in the cafeteria, as well as in detention — face the same issues.

McKennis, who grew up in Minneapolis and on Dansby Street in Jackson, was a member of a gang and sold cocaine before turning his life around, after he was stabbed during a fight and nearly died. McKennis now mentors young people and speaks to audiences about his struggle to rise above his circumstances.

Kala Hunter, a seventh-grader at Vicksburg Junior High, came with other members of Vicksburg Family Development Service Girls Club to hear McKennis talk about staying on a right path. She said she sees the things McKennis talked about in her own school.

“It’s a lot of gangbanging stuff going on,” she said.

A volunteer with the Girls Club, Sarah Wilkerson, said the issue should not be ignored.

“It’s real. Kids these days don’t know the things out there in the streets. This is real,” she said. “This applies to Vicksburg.”

Gwendolyn Appleby, 42, director of the Girls Club, said things in Vicksburg today are not how she remembers growing up here.

“I didn’t experience gang violence. We didn’t experience it in my time. I had peer pressures, social pressures, all the other pressures,” she said.

Appleby said role models are an important factor in encouraging kids to make the right decisions.

“There’s always somebody. It might be a teacher, counselor or principal. There’s always going to be someone to give that incentive, to say, this is a choice, what you decide to do with your life.”

Throughout it all, McKennis said his grandmother was the one who encouraged him to go to church and leave “thug life” behind.

Appleby said one person’s positive influence can mean a lot.

“If one person makes that decision to break that cycle, other parents, other family members, they’re going to try to break that cycle, too.

Gray said many parents she sees — and some whom she never does — need to help.

“Parents, most of them already know about what happens because they’re out on the streets anyway,” she said.

McKennis, who is also a mentor, said the deepest root of the problem is a lack of motivation.

“For the most part, all kids want to be successful,” he said. But, “they’re subject to the norms and values of this wicked world.”

“It starts with the teachers,” McKennis said. “We need teachers who teach with a passion.”

Gray, who said she planned to take some of what McKennis said Saturday to her kids at school, said she thinks what kids need to help them make strong, positive choices is attention.

“That’s why, when they see me in the hall, when I see them at the games, they’ll always hear me say, ‘Come see me. Come see me.'”