Kenneth Braboy was out of the classroom for about four hours Tuesday. He spent much of it in a miniature golf foursome with Chauncey Davis, the Falcons' third-year defensive end.

All that for coming to school and doing his homework.

Said Kenneth, a seventh-grader at Atlanta's Sammye E. Coan Middle School, "I wish I could do this more."

That he could do it at all was a treat from Davis, who has struck up a relationship with Coan, in Atlanta's Kirkwood neighborhood. Tuesday morning, 27 students in Kenneth's seventh-grade home room hopped a bus to Duluth to play miniature golf and hang out with Davis, an event coordinated by DTLR, an urban fashion retail chain. Teacher Eddie Toliver's home room won the prize by having the school's top combination of attendance and homework completion since the start of the school year, about 95 percent for each, according to Toliver.

"You always hear about kids doing bad stuff," said Davis, who has more outings planned. "We want to let these kids know you can do good and still get rewarded."

It was perhaps not the most educational of field trips, but Toliver, who has been teaching at Coan for 19 years, will take the help where he can get it. He considered it exposure and hoped that it might lead to an interest in actual golf.

"A museum wouldn't have been the reward they would have been looking for," he said. "Let's be realistic."

The prize — Davis came to the school earlier in the year to tell students that top home rooms would receive rewards — motivated some students to the point that they called classmates who missed school to tell them the assignments they'd missed.

While Etosha Murray said she had forgotten about the incentive, her classmate and playing partner Ashley Hood said that when she didn't feel like doing her homework, "I did it anyway because I didn't want to let my classmates down and didn't want them mad at me."

Etosha and Ashley were also split on being away from class for miniature golf. Etosha said she would have preferred to have stayed in school, concerned about missed classes. Said Ashley, who may have a future as a school administrator, "I think it's good because all the other home rooms are going to be mad and it'll make them do what they're supposed to do so they can do something fun."

The outing was a pleasant diversion for Davis, who conceded he himself wasn't much of a middle school student. He plans to earn his social science degree from Florida State, but said he is one course shy of graduation, a fact he said his mother reminds him of "all the time."

After the round, Davis talked to the students as they ate lunch, encouraging them to keep up their studies, kidding them about their scores and checking on their lunch selections.

Said Davis, "When I work with kids, I have lots of fun."