Safe place, family support key to Riverside grad’s success

Max Wallette-Johnson didn’t bring much to Tina and Darrin Marion’s house in February 2014, a friend of their son’s who’d asked to stay a week or two: a few clothes for his 6-foot-8 frame, a head of bushy hair that practically begged for a cut, and an academic record marked by lack of attendance and not many credits.

They bought him some clothes. They gave him a haircut. They took him to the dentist – nine times – and to family activities.

It turned out what Wallette-Johnson needed most was a family’s support. Would he be graduating from Riverside High School this spring without the Marions, with whom he’s still living in Chattaroy, that week or two having stretched to a year and a half?

“No,” he answered quickly, sitting with Tina Marion at a coffee shop in north Spokane. “Probably not.”

Wallette-Johnson had lived with his mother and an older sister in Elk. His father had left and his grandmother had died, and things at home had fallen apart, he said. Their broken water pump never got fixed, which meant no running water. He missed so much school he ended up in court under the state’s truancy law. Homework piled up.

One day last year Wallette-Johnson came home to find the power shut off. He asked his friend Daniel Marion – they sang together in the choir – if he could stay with his family. With his mother’s blessing, he said, Tina Marion became his legal guardian.

Wallette-Johnson started passing classes and signed up for more – including online and summer classes – to catch up. He joined the yearbook staff. He joined the track team. He enrolled in a team-based class he liked that combined English, science and math. His group was building an electric car they’d be racing, a handmade drivable go-cart.

After graduation, he plans to move into a house in Spokane with the Marions’ sons – Daniel is 19 and graduated last year; Darrik is 21 – find a job to pay his bills, and “hopefully, after that, maybe community college.”

Tina Marion works as a substitute paraprofessional in Riverside schools. She’s an active parent, pitching in to help the choir especially.

“One of the No. 1 things I get told at school about him,” she said, “is that he went from trying to blend in in the halls and being quiet and keeping to himself more, to this happy, expressive, ‘how are you doing today’-type person that’s kind of blossomed.”

Wallette-Johnson credited his new home.

“Well, there was running water for one. That was kind of nice,” he said. “But just generally it was a place where people weren’t yelling all the time, were happy. It was a better situation where I could focus on what was important.”

When it came time to do the work – the catching up required to graduate with his class – it was all him.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I also had her and other people behind me.”

“A nagging mother,” Tina Marion said, laughing.

“Which I one-hundred percent appreciate,” Wallette-Johnson said.