The kid who used to fight staged one to thank his principal

Every school has a short list of kids the grown-ups expect to find in trouble. On Oct. 8, Bobby Davis, the first-year principal at Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School in Georgia, was told a fight had broken out in the cafeteria. He ran for it and pushed through a crowd of students holding up their phones. Then he grabbed one of the two boys, a student Davis knew well and knew had a history of fighting.

The fight was fake. The room broke into "Happy Birthday," because it was Davis's 51st, and the boy he grabbed had planned the whole thing. De'Zayviun Watkins, 17 and a senior, has known Davis since freshman year, when by his own account he "struggled with anger and got into fights." Within seconds Davis was jumping into students' arms. "I kind of went back to being a kid again," he told TODAY, whose story about the two of them is making the rounds again this week.

In that interview Watkins kept calling himself a bad kid, and Davis kept refusing to agree: "He's a good kid. He's a great kid." There's an old story about that argument. The prophet Samuel goes to Jesse's house in Bethlehem to anoint Israel's next king, takes one look at the tall eldest son, and is sure he's looking at a king. God tells him no, and tells him why: people go by what they can see, and God goes by the heart. Seven sons walk past Samuel and none of them is the one. The youngest, David, is out with the sheep, and nobody had thought to call him in.

A teenager's record is his outward appearance. It's what everyone can see, and it's often what the kid goes on believing about himself the longest. Only God sees a heart all the way down. Davis has a plain way of describing the part a principal can do: "You got to know your kids for who they are. They know if you really don't care." He doesn't get all the credit, either. Watkins says football in 10th grade taught him to take coaching. Now he writes poetry and music and wants to become an auto mechanic.

So Watkins took the thing everyone used to see first in him and turned it into a birthday present.

He's still learning to believe what his principal says about him, but the thank-you didn't wait for that. On Oct. 8 even Davis's own reflex went by the record, and he reached for the boy with the history of fighting. A second later he was standing in a singing lunchroom, finding out he'd been right about that boy all along.