ETROIT - He's a football tossing, Deion Sanders loving, ''Rocket Power'' watching 11-year-old. He's got one little brother who follows him round all the time, which is sometimes swell and sometimes a pain. He is king of his front yard, but never, under any circumstances, is he to venture beyond the end of his street.
His name is Lester Sherman III. But most everybody calls him Bud.
And to hear the candidates tell it, huge portions of the next president's energies will be devoted to improving his fortunes, and those of children just like him.
Al Gore and George W. Bush have spent more time battling over education in this election than candidates in any previous presidential contest. This despite the fact that Washington holds only faint sway over what happens in schools like Detroit's.
Bush has pledged at every turn to ''leave no child behind'' and to end ''the soft bigotry of low expectations'' through rigorous testing and by helping parents escape failing schools. Gore spends much of his time on the trail surrounded by the schoolchildren he has vowed to save with more teachers, universal preschool, and after-school programs. He has even slept in teachers' houses to underscore his commitment.
But Bud's parents have a question or two for the men who would lead them to educational salvation.
Why should they wait? Why should they have faith that something will finally be done? Why should their children have to rely on yet another promise of reform?
''The system needs a lot of work,'' said Leslie Sherman, 32, Bud's stepmother. ''And I don't have that kind of time to wait until they get it all together. A year of a bad experiment could be detrimental to a child.''
So the Sherman family has taken some extraordinary steps on its own. They wonder why it had to come to this:
To keep him out of the Detroit system, Leslie and Bud's father, Lester Sherman, are sending him to live with his mother a few days a week so that he can attend a better public middle school in her neighboring county.
''It was extremely difficult for us to make the decision,'' Leslie Sherman said. ''But we felt the benefits of being in the Center Line School District outweighed our feelings.''
The Shermans live on a neat street of small but handsome, Tudor-style houses on Detroit's East Side. Last Sunday afternoon, Bud played football out front with some of his church friends, while his father watched the real thing on television. Elijah, one of Lester and Leslie's other children, who is 20 months old, stuck close to his big brother, or swung from a corner of the dining table. Matthew, 7 months old, was happy with his bottle and his father's knee.
Lester, a sales representative at Nextel, will make about $45,000 this year. After the rent, payments on two cars, utilities, and food, there's not much left for the family of five. Leslie was working part time as a legal secretary, but she quit because she was spending almost all of her earnings on day care. She buys food at Sam's Club, or uses coupons.
The Shermans are just the kind of serious-about-voting, hard-working, worried parents both candidates are trying to win over. And they are the kind of parents educators covet, closely involved in Bud's education and eager to visit with teachers.
This is what the Shermans saw in Bud's Detroit elementary school: classrooms with at least 35 students, children arriving long after the tardy bell rang, then talking and standing through lessons, teachers making photocopies with their own money.
Bud came home without homework many days. He complained that his teacher had no time to answer his questions, or to help him with his writing. And he offered alarming accounts of his school days: He kept his lunch at his desk, because there were rodents and bugs in the lockers. A math teacher launched into a discussion of race relations, freely using the N-word, which the Shermans have banned. But it was the bomb threats that really tore it. Toward the end, there was one a week, they said.
''That's not an environment conducive to learning,'' Leslie Sherman said.
Since Bud's was considered one of the better Detroit public schools, the Shermans didn't even consider the others. Only 46 percent of Detroit's public school students graduate, according to the Michigan Department of Education.
Everyone agrees that many schools in Michigan, as in the nation, are in crisis. The state has taken control of some Michigan school districts. Others have signed contracts with a for-profit education management company. And Michigan has more charter schools than almost any other state - 183.
In November, the state will vote on Proposal One, which would provide children in failing school districts with $3,100 in annual vouchers to defray tuition at any private school. That's more than twice what Bush provides in his voucher proposal, which Gore opposes. The Shermans will vote Yes.
They wanted Bud to attend a charter school, but those in their neighborhood were full. So they scoured the private school possibilities, and got a scholarship to send him to the nearby Peace Lutheran School.
There, Bud's classes contained only 16 students, and he felt like he could ask as many questions as he wanted. He scored A's and B's.
''This teacher communicated with us more in one semester than his public school teachers communicated with us over the three years that he was there,'' Leslie Sherman said.
Tuition at the private school was $2400 a year, and the Shermans could barely manage that with the $800 scholarship. But last year, Lester's income rose, and they lost the scholarship. That's when they hit on the idea of sending Bud to stay with his mother in Macomb County, where class sizes average 28 or fewer.
''Thank God his mother moved out there,'' Leslie Sherman said. ''A lot of parents don't have any alternatives.''
With Elijah and Matthew, however, the Shermans won't have such an alternative. If Proposal One doesn't pass, they will have to come up with private school tuition, they said.
But what if the public schools could improve by then?
''I'm not gonna hold my breath,'' Leslie Sherman said. ''This problem didn't take five years to get here, so it's probably going to take more than five years to rectify.''
If Bud had not been able to move to Macomb County, he'd probably be at the Miller Middle School, where the national debate over vouchers, charters, and accountability looks mighty different than it does to the Shermans.
Principal Pierre Hendrix is proud of the school he has headed for 10 years, and he runs a tight ship. When he enters a classroom, his questions draw immediate, loud answers from students. Teachers come quickly when called.
In 2000, Miller's seventh-grade reading and math test results showed the most dramatic improvement in the state, matching the best Michigan schools, because much class time is now devoted solely to exam preparation.
Miller's eighth-graders haven't fared as well. Only 25 percent performed at the proficient level in the last writing exam, and 75 percent fell into the ''not yet novice'' category.
Unlike private schools, Miller cannot choose its students. Sixty percent of them come from poor families, Hendrix said. Between 25 and 30 percent are special education students.
''Competition would be good for us if we were all on the same playing field,'' Hendrix said. ''But charter schools pull away the cream of the crop, which leaves neighborhood schools with more challenging students.''
Bud Sherman's absence hurts Miller, staff membersthere said. When a student chooses to go to another school over a Detroit public school, $6,600 goes with him. Before charter schools, Miller had about 900 students, Hendrix said. Now there are 780. Yet some classes still contain 35 or 40 pupils.
And the loss is more than financial, teachers said. Miller desperately needs bright, involved parents like the Shermans to help turn the school around.
But here's the central dilemma of public education right now: Until he feels the Detroit system has something more to offer him, Bud Sherman's father isn't going anywhere near it.
He mulls the idea that it has taken three educated, committed adults to get his son the kind of learning he needs. He knows how few Detroit children have that.
''Scary, isn't it?'' he said.
