A college drop-out abandons a lucrative tech career for a life of inner-city poverty – and hopes to save an urban school district from oblivion

At 16, he packed up and moved back to Kansas City. Payne says West stayed with her for a short time but then struck out on his own. He lived with a couple of friends while he attended Shawnee Mission East High School. To make rent, he got a job in Westport. Then a friend borrowed and wrecked his car, making it impossible to commute. West says he ended up living in an empty building near the school. He showered each morning in the school gym's locker room.

After attending 11 schools, he graduated from Shawnee Mission East in 1997.

One Friday morning that year, Payne says, West asked for a lift to Lawrence. He told her to pick him up after the weekend. "By Monday, he'd enrolled in school, talked someone into renting him an apartment — even though he wasn't 18 — and he'd gotten two part-time jobs," Payne says with a laugh.

He didn't stay at the University of Kansas for long. Records show that West was enrolled at KU only from fall 1997 to summer 1998. He'd always been skilled with computers, and a job opportunity in Lenexa was too good to pass up, West says. For his job with Cephas, a dot-com-era Web development firm, he jetted all over the country. West remembers making more money than he knew what to do with.

But Cephas went under. West secured some of the contracts and started his own company; when he sold out to Computer Sciences Corporation, a business technology services firm based in California, it seemed time to move on. Certain realities had begun to outweigh his financial comfort and professional success.

"Lenexa was a wake-up call," West says. "Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought if I could be successful in the dot-com industry, if I made enough money, then I would be accepted there as who I was: a bright guy with a successful company making lots of money. Turns out, that was not the case. I was still just some black kid."

He bought the house in Ivanhoe and slowly became involved in the neighborhood association. By 2004, he was leading the creation of a detailed, resident-driven neighborhood plan. He didn't know anything about city zoning, and he knew even less about his neighbors.

At one point, West and the other organizers drafted a 60-page report based on input from several group meetings. West argued that sending the bulky document to all the residents would be a waste of paper. No one would read it, he argued.

At the next meeting, dozens of his neighbors showed up, their reports worn from reading and covered in notes.

"It was really a series of moments like that that took over," he says. "Now, instead of being a full-time technology entrepreneur, making scads of money and being very self-important, I'm a part-time, gainfully unemployed computer hacker between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. and spend most of all day every day working on community projects that don't pay a dime."