Erik Erazo, hair slicked back, tattoos peeking out from his rolled-up shirtsleeves, surveys the Olathe garage, filled with teens clinking wrenches and adjusting tall handlebars.

To the side is their finished work: lowrider bikes embellished with velvet banana seats, metallic paint and intricately twisted metal, each worth as much as $5,000.

At one time, Erazo, a California-bred mechanic, was very much like these high schoolers. The child of Guatemalan immigrants, he struggled to embrace his identity while straddling two cultures. A teen dad, he was labeled a troubled kid at risk of dropping out of school, and was rarely encouraged to aspire for more than that.

But today, Erazo has worked his way up from serving as a school security officer to becoming one of the top administrators in the Olathe school district. Through his perspective, Erazo has created programs — like his lowrider bike club — that have transformed the lives of dozens of students, while helping to reshape the community they live in.

As a result, every single participant has gone on to graduate, a far higher rate than is typical for at-risk students. The success and the community connections have drawn national notice — even the federal Drug Enforcement Administration is interested.

“I personally thought that with all this crazy stuff that happened in my life, I just need to close it in a closet so that I could be a professional. But I found that you have to bring that out, because that matters. My background, my history, what I’ve been through is real, and you might be going through the same thing,” Erazo said. “So that’s what I try to bring to the table. If I didn’t have people who believed in me, I wouldn’t be here.”

Despite being the executive director of diversity and engagement, Erazo doesn’t spend his time sitting in the district’s administrative offices. He works out of the alternative high school, to be near the kids he’s hoping to reach, or at the auto tech center, where he teaches students how to build lowrider bikes from scratch.

The club not only offers high schoolers a chance to customize a flashy, envy-inducing bike, but also an opportunity to develop relationships with mentors and connect to the significant history of Mexican American lowrider culture. The club has yielded a 100% graduation rate among participants, many considered at risk of failing high school, and many a part of the district’s growing Hispanic population — which makes up more than 17% of students this year.

Word of the club’s success has spread far beyond Olathe. The program is now being duplicated in Española, New Mexico — the unofficial “lowrider capital of the world.” Locally, a new chapter launched this month in Kansas City, Kansas. And a Kansas City Public Schools principal is considering starting up something similar as well.

Before joining the club, “I really didn’t express my culture that much,” senior Oswaldo Polanco said, before he got to work rebuilding the frame of his candy-orange 1970s-style lowrider. “But when I joined the club, I learned more stuff about my culture that I really didn’t know. Just knowing that there’s actually people out there who actually care about my culture, it was just really exciting.”

Polanco, whose parents immigrated to Kansas from Mexico, credits the bike club and the mentors he’s met there for motivating him to graduate. He plans on being the first in his family to earn a college degree.

“It’s essentially art therapy, but we don’t tell the kids that,” Erazo said.

“The formula that I created here has nothing to do with lowriding as much as it does with having relationships, having mentorships, having art therapy,” he said. “I want to see that duplicated throughout the country because I see the hurt and the pain in other communities.”

Erazo grew up in the San Francisco area, watching elaborately painted lowrider cars with bouncing hydraulics cruise through the Mission District.

He found his identity within the Chicano lowrider car culture, which later inspired him to go to school to become a mechanic.

But work was scarce, Erazo said, and he had a family to care for. He became a dad at age 16, and was married by 18. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, and by his early 20s, was a father of four.

Desperate for a steady job, Erazo followed a cousin to the Kansas City area 18 years ago, hoping there would be more opportunities available.

“I ended up landing a security job, and the first place they sent me was to Olathe North High School,” he said. “And then once I got there, I started seeing there was a Hispanic population that was increasing in Olathe. And a lot of kids, I felt like, were behaving like they were trying to mimic the California lifestyle.”

Working security, Erazo met students in some of their most difficult moments, often reminding him of his own childhood, when he too was getting in trouble and struggling to remain committed to finishing high school.

“I really felt like that was not a good place to be. I grew up in that environment,” he said. “So I would go talk to counselors and tell them they should talk to these kids. And they would tell me that if I’m willing, that I should do it. So little by little, I started talking to kids and getting more involved.”

Coming from California, Erazo assumed that Hispanic students in Olathe had plenty of organizations to help them and teachers who looked like them. “And there wasn’t any,” he said.

“I was like man, there’s really nothing for you guys over here. And that’s why I really felt a responsibility to them. I know you need this. I think I can put it together for you. I can’t leave you here alone.”

At first, he was nervous about speaking openly with kids, he said, but quickly realized that his experience resonated with Hispanic students, even in Kansas.

“When you come to the United States, as a parent you feel extremely disconnected from your child. And this is where a lot of the prime problems can arise and gangs can sneak in,” he said. “The kid doesn’t feel like he’s 100% American or 100% Mexican. The kids are stuck in this weird space.”

“What they don’t say is that maybe your family is struggling financially, and no I didn’t get my homework done yesterday because I had to take care of my little brother. Those are the things you don’t say because it doesn’t fit in with what others are experiencing. So I would just give the kids an opportunity to talk to me, and I didn’t make them feel strange.”

After a few months, Erazo became an in-school suspension supervisor. And realizing he had a gift for reaching students, he got the bug to teach. After detention let out, Erazo would take night classes at Kansas City, Kansas Community College. On his off days, he would attend Pittsburg State University, which eventually led him to earn his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education.

Half the day, Erazo would watch over students in suspension, while the other half he would be pulled out of class to speak with students who were struggling in school. “And that’s when it became a full-time gig eventually, where all I did was talk with the kids.”

“I think the stereotype of Johnson County, and the stereotype of Olathe, is that there’s money out there. There’s influence out there. But at the same time, we have one of the largest mobile home communities. Washington Elementary is 66% Hispanic,” Erazo said. “So I think it’s important to even the playing field and give the kids what they need to be successful. And to do that, you have to talk to them. And you have to know the community.”

Even though he felt called to the work, there were times when Erazo questioned what he was doing, as he struggled to make ends meet while earning his degree.

“With four kids and a wife, it wasn’t easy. Money wasn’t there,” he said. “But it was absolutely worth it. And selfishly, I also thought about my own kids. I want them to have the opportunities here. To not to have to grow up in an environment that doesn’t allow for opportunity.”

Erazo worked his way through a variety of jobs in Olathe, as a paraprofessional, teacher’s aide and auto technical teacher before making it to the administrative level.

During those years at North, he connected with students like Gerardo Jimenez, who was born in the U.S. but raised in Mexico for several years before moving back. He struggled to navigate the language and cultural barriers.

“I was often the only Hispanic around me. At first, I started hating my culture. I started hating who I was,” said Jimenez, who graduated from Olathe North in 2012.

His freshman year, Jimenez met Erazo, who had started a Hispanic Leadership Club and convinced him to join. For the first time, Jimenez said he sat in a classroom filled with students who had similar experiences.

“I meet kids with the same problems and the same background, and I’m like, wow, people like this exist here,” he said. “And then meeting Erik (Erazo) just inspired me. Because you didn’t see a lot of Hispanic teachers, and you still don’t.”

“Growing up, teachers never understood me. They’d tell me that I’m making stuff up when I said that I’d have to work. My parents, sometimes their jobs let them go. And I’d have to pick up hours to help them out with rent,” he said. “And Erik was the only one that was there for me. He listened, he understood, and that’s all you had to do.”

Erazo launched the Hispanic Leadership Club for students to connect with one another, learn more about their culture and get involved in the community. He started building relationships with elementary school students, then in middle school introduced them to more responsibility, including community service projects like toy drives.

“At the time it was the construction boom of Johnson County. So a lot of their dads were working, they were building Gardner. And the kids were hardly seeing Dad at all. And so this was another opportunity for them to have an adult male in their life,” Erazo said.

By high school, students in the club are offered access to more opportunities, such as college trips and scholarships.

“Many of their parents haven’t lived through the college thing and it’s very foreign to them. That’s not something that’s being talked about,” he said. “And even if you know you want this for your kid, you don’t know if you can achieve it financially. So subconsciously, kids are already getting the message that college is not a thing for me. So why is my effort going to graduating high school when it should be about going to work and making money?”

Erazo started offering bilingual parent classes as well, teaching them the ins and outs of the American education system, how to file a financial aid form and apply to college.

“Everybody leaves their country with that American dream. Everybody wants their kids to be doctors and lawyers and all that. Some of them risk their lives to come here for their kids. They care. The reality is I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to reach that American dream,” he said. “So this has to mean something. And you have to show them how and why this is worth it.”

The Hispanic Leadership Club continued to grow, and is now available at all Olathe high schools. But some Latino and at-risk students continued to fall through the cracks, Erazo said.

“The data will tell you that any high school kid who is at risk, the solution really is after-school activities and mentors. We know what the answer is. But the challenge is to get a kid that’s already not engaged in school and tell them to come stay after school and talk to adults about their life and their feelings,” Erazo said. “So how do you get the kids there?”

One day, Erazo decided to build a lowrider bike — inspired by the cars of his youth — and bring it to the high school.

“Kids were interested and would ask me if they could have one. And I’d say, sure, just come over on Mondays and build it. And that’s how I would get them in the room,” he said. And the weekly lowrider bike club was formed in 2017.

“It wasn’t about counseling. It wasn’t about anything. Literally kids would skip class all day and show up after school just to come to this club. That’s when we added the mentor piece, and it grew tremendously.”

When freshmen join the club, held at the Olathe Advanced Technical Center, they’re handed a bike kit. Students have all of high school to build their lowrider. By the time they’re reaching graduation, many of the students have painted, customized and perfected their bikes to where they could sell for $3,000, even $5,000, Erazo said.

He’s earned the nickname “The Lowrider Teacher.”

Erazo said a key to the program’s success is community buy-in. The grant-funded club has grown through donations from the Olathe Police Department, the DEA and other organizations. Police officers, firefighters and community members volunteer each week, helping students build their bikes while also finding subtle ways to build relationships.

He said that students especially appreciate that the mentors are there on their own time. They’re not being paid to be there, they simply are there for them, because they care. And after a few weeks of building bikes together, Erazo said, mentors are able to connect on a deeper level, making it easier to encourage the students to finish that homework assignment or make it to class on time the next day.

“That means a lot to kids, being held accountable. We do that,” he said. “And that’s one thing about having a bunch of male mentors. They’re like, ‘Hey bro, how come you didn’t go to school? You told me you’d go and you didn’t go, what’s up with that?’ There’s no soft approach. And the kids love it. They love that they’re being held accountable.”

Some of the mentors are former students, like Jimenez, who returned after being inspired by Erazo in high school. Now a migrant specialist for the district, Jimenez is working on earning an education degree to become a teacher.

Jimenez is already paying it forward. Senior Oswaldo Polanco met Jimenez on his first day attending the club. When they were introduced, Jimenez granted Polanco a nickname. He’s gone by Ozzy ever since.

Polanco has spent hours perfecting his lowrider, welding custom artwork to the frame and painting it a retro shade of orange. He’s motivated to win at car and bike shows this year.

The bike club has offered him a chance to learn about and appreciate his culture, something he struggled to do growing up in Johnson County. He’s become captivated by the lowrider community that was born out of the California Mexican American culture and can be traced as far back as the 1940s. The customized “low and slow” cars are an artistic expression of their cultural identity — something far more significant, Erazo said, than the depictions of lowriders most Midwestern students have been exposed to in rap music videos and movies.

“Through this, we get to tell kids that you can be successful. You can get a doctorate degree. You can be somebody. And you can keep your culture. You can keep your lowriding,” Erazo said. “I think that really encourages kids to continue to move forward because they know they don’t have to drop their identity and who they are. That’s what you see here with these kids. They get to come here and express themselves.”

The club, which is open to any student, has grown to roughly 40 members at any given time, nearly evenly split between boys and girls. Many of the students also attend another of Erazo’s programs: The Spot, a casual after-school hangout for students who need it, and may not be able to afford a paid program or a pass to the community center.

Held at the Johnson County Youth and Family Services Center, the free program lets students talk to mentors, play video games and basketball, get help on homework and even play and record music in a studio.

Through partnerships with the DEA and police department, Polanco said he and other students, who often don’t trust law enforcement due to their own experiences, have also had a chance to chat with officers in a casual setting for the first time. Olathe Police Sgt. Logan Bonney and others often spend time off-duty volunteering and finding ways to connect with the teens.

Near the finished bikes in the Advanced Technical Center garage sits an old Olathe Police vehicle, a 2011 Ford Crown Victoria, transformed into a sleek, cobalt-blue lowrider car with hydraulics, chrome wire wheels and whitewall tires. While students in the lowrider club have worked on bikes individually, they’ve also helped build and customize the cop car as a group.

The club also has built a custom lowrider bike for the fire department, a fire truck-red tricycle, with twisted gold handlebars. Another bike was designed to honor Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, custom-painted with elaborate flowers and skulls. Bikes built in the club have been displayed across the Kansas City area, including at several museums and car shows.

While he’s motivated to finish his bike, Polanco said it is the relationships he’s built in the club that keep him coming back. He plans on attending Johnson County Community College to work toward a business degree, and then pursue a career in auto tech. His parents would be proud, he said, to see him be the first in their family to attend college.

Polanco said that it’s still “stressful and hard” that he cannot go to his parents with many college application questions, but Erazo, Jimenez and others in the bike club have helped him.

Every student who has stuck with the club has graduated, Erazo said, and many have gone on to college, several with the help of scholarships obtained through relationships made over building lowriders.

Since 2017, Erazo said the club has had a 100% graduation rate. Last school year, the district overall had a 91.8% four-year graduation rate, but the rate among male Hispanic students was 79.5%. Male students who qualify for free lunch had a 78.3% graduation rate, while females in the same group graduated at a rate of 90.7%.

“I really didn’t plan on going to college. I probably would have dropped out my senior year. School wasn’t my thing,” Polanco said. “But they actually showed me that I could have a future for me.”

Last summer, Erazo traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to present at the National Community Policing Forum about the success of the Olathe lowrider bike club.

The presentation caught the attention of the DEA there. Spokesman Carlos Briano said that agents saw an opportunity to start building stronger relationships with youth.

“What we really liked about Olathe was that these at-risk youth really thought very low of law enforcement because of the bad experiences that they had, but as they worked on the bikes together, the youth saw that they’re regular folks. They’re dads, they’re sons, they’re husbands. So it humanized law enforcement to these youth,” Briano said. “And at the same time, I think a lot of these law enforcement officers saw the at-risk youth in a different light. Not as a gang banger or someone dealing drugs. But someone’s son. Someone’s brother.

“That’s what we loved about the program. And we want the same for us.”

Briano said the DEA is launching a similar lowrider bike program in Española, a town outside Santa Fe known for its lowrider culture. It will be a part of the agency’s efforts to do more youth outreach and do more to prevent drug trafficking.

“I’m a former teacher, and they say that a student isn’t going to care about your subject knowledge until they realize you care about the student. So you have to establish relationships before there’s learning,” he said. “When that has been established, through weeks or months of working on a project together, then maybe that youth is more likely to call that mentor when they’re struggling. That’s the goal.”

Rogeana Patterson-King, who helps oversee the Kansas City district office of the DEA, said officials saw that Erazo’s formula for the bike club can easily be duplicated.

In Kansas City, Kansas, earlier this month, a new chapter of the club was launched, run by the Police Athletic League.

“Students get to interact with officers who aren’t in their uniforms. They realize that these law enforcement officers aren’t getting paid to spend time with these students. They want to have an interaction with us. It develops a sense of partnership,” Patterson-King said. “Having these officers come and mentor and spend time with them, it changes the culture. It changes a community.”

In Kansas City Public Schools, the lowrider bike club also has sparked the interest of East High School Principal Luis Hinojosa. He said he is working on solidifying partnerships with local police and others who could help get a similar club off the ground.

“I love what (Erazo) is doing, and I want to have that at East,” he said.

Hinojosa said the conversations are in the very early stages, and he might take Erazo’s outline and change it to better fit his school’s diverse population.

“My hope is that people will take the formula that I have created here and use it however they see fit,” Erazo said. “If you’re in rural Kansas, maybe lowriding isn’t going to work for you. I know cars and I know bikes, so that’s what I implemented into the system. But it could be sewing, it could be board game day, it could be whatever. But it’s about engaging at a different level.”

The secret, Erazo said, is showing kids that they don’t have to sacrifice their identity to succeed in life. And that there are people who care enough about their future success to hold them accountable today.

“Continuing to give kids negative attention and negative consequences and expecting them to change, I think is just absurd. I think a lot of times, the kids don’t feel connected to the school or to class,” Erazo said. “I think what kids respond to is having a relationship with somebody. Because now, if I need help I know where to find it. I know who cares about me. And now I want to make you proud.”

“I think this can be duplicated anywhere in the world, as long as you have people who actually care.”