Nix, 20, was using drugs on the streets of Albany in the summer of 1998 — and largely ignoring his baby son Jaylen — when his mother learned of a new program at South Georgia Technical Institute in Americus, Ga. The program, called Fast Track to Jobs, serves non-custodial fathers between the ages of 16 and 21, and is part of the broader Georgia Fatherhood Initiative Program (see article at the end of this section). She called Nix on the carpet and told him she would put him out of the house unless he attended.

"Growing up, my dad was in and out a lot," Nix explains. "She didn't want me to let my girlfriend down like that. She said a man should raise a boy. And I felt I needed to get away from Albany for awhile, too — it was in the back of my head."

So Nix reluctantly signed up for the program, a kind of summer camp for teenage fathers who are not providing child support for their children, and spent the next six weeks living in a South Georgia Tech dorm.

"When I got there, there were a bunch of guys standing around that I had never seen before, all of them looking gloomy about being there," he remembers. "I didn't want to be babysat. I thought I had made a big mistake."

But then he took the entrance exam and scored highest in the class. He began cracking books, learning parenting skills, attending counseling and job-skills sessions, playing intramural softball and lifting weights with new friends.

"I learned it's okay to tell my son I love him," Nix says. "It was just like being a student."

Nix enjoyed the experience so much that he stayed in Americus that fall, enrolling in South Georgia Tech's aircraft structural maintenance program and obtaining certification as a repairman. He was soon offered a job at the Ayres Corporation fixing crop dusters and other planes at the company's Albany repair station. And an Albany judge, impressed by his new attitude, wiped his slate clean of previous transgressions.

"This young man turned around and got on the right track as a result of being in our program," says Frank Bates, who oversees the Fast Track program across the state.

The Fast Track to Jobs summer program currently operates at two campuses, one in each half of the state. South Georgia Tech and North Georgia Technical Institute in Clarkesville — the only two state technical institutes with dormitories were chosen to host the pilot program in 1998; the state was bisected by an imaginary line, and fathers attended whichever campus was closer to their homes. (In 1999, the North Georgia program was moved to a complex of military dorms adjacent to Coosa Valley Technical Institute in Rome, Ga.) Participants must be between ages 16 and 21 and have a child they are not supporting; in return, they are paid $600 for attending the classes.

"How can we help them overcome barriers to being financially part of their children's lives?" asks Deborah Hackett, coordinator of an affiliated women's job-skills program, New Connections to Work, at South Georgia Tech. "We want to take these young men, who often never had a father image in their own homes, and show them there's a way they can be a part of their child's life. We do a lot of counseling. They just don't understand the concept of being a parent, because they never had any idea what a dad was, or how to talk to their kids. We actually give them a book of things to talk with their kids about. Because they just don't know."

Now, in the wake of success stories like Talemicus Nix's — and national attention from NBC-TV and other media — there is talk of expanding the summer program to additional technical institute campuses during the coming years.

"If you can change the father's life, you've changed a lot of lives," concludes Hackett. "Not only his, but the mother of the child's, and the child's. That's what we're working toward."

"I would tell young guys that this is something that can really help you," agrees Nix. "It gets you out of that macho thing and into being responsible. It's a wake-up call."