“I want to help people get their citizenship and their residency so that they can help their families out.”
But first, she has to get through high school, and that’s been a set of challenges in itself.
She was born in Hamilton, she said, but in her house they spoke Spanish. So when she started at Jefferson Elementary School, in the days before English as Second Language was an option, she struggled.
“I don’t know how I got through first grade,” she said. “But I failed second grade because I couldn’t read or write English.”
Then ESL became an option, she said, and she was fine after that, became active in school sports and safety patrol, and even became a speaker for the DARE program at her school. History, especially World War II, is her favorite subject.
Then shortly after she turned 16, a ninth-grader, she got pregnant for the first time.
“At first, I was worried because I was so young,” she said, and because of her Catholic upbringing, abortion wasn’t an option. “So I just had her and I felt so happy.”
Now with two daughters — Jerelyn and Liliana — and living on her own, she’s finding it hard to get through high school and still spend time with her girls.
But with strong support systems from her family and from the HOPE school at the Hamilton Education Center, where she only has to come for three hours a day and do the rest online, she is determined to struggle through and has her sights set for law school.
“People say, ‘Well, who can’t come to school for three hours a day?’ ” said Nancy Hulshult, principal of the Hamilton Education Center. “Well, some of them can’t. There are different values and different cultures to deal with, and we have to overcome some of that.”
“The only reason I come to school is I have a teacher here to tell me I have to do it,” Guitierrez said. “The teachers all know my life story and how hard it’s been for me, but they look out for me and tell me that I can do it. I just have to work hard.
“I think I’ll be able to graduate at the beginning of next year.”
Students required to think about college
The HOPE School may be the only school in the district with metal detectors at the front door, the only school where students are required to wear lanyards with their identification on them.
But those symbols of potential danger and (some might say) oppression, which include a full-time uniformed officer and security cameras, are balanced by the attempts by both students and administrators at providing an atmosphere of, well, hope.
From the parking lot behind the building, visitors can see signs of “Love” and “Hope,” literally, in colorful posters in the windows facing outward. In the hallway, there are painted tiles celebrating the success of graduates .
“They leave their name behind,” said Principal Nancy Hulshult. “We tell them, 'This is your legacy.’ ”
But perhaps the most eye-popping symbol of hope is in the office of counselor (“and so much more,” Hulshult said) Richard Vereker.
The office walls are covered with dozens of banners from colleges across the country, a brightly stunning display that leads any visitor to ask about.
“It’s an ice breaker,” he said. “They’ll come in and say, 'Wow! Did you go to all those schools?’”
Of course, he didn’t. He simply wrote letters to all of the colleges explaining the HOPE program and asking for a pennant to help motivate the students.
“Once a student asks me about it,” he said, “I can start showing them how to research colleges and we go through the process.”
Even in HOPE, what is often the last chance for some of its students to get a high school education, college is still on the table, if not shoved in their faces.
“In the last five years we’ve been pushing the idea that the diploma is just the next step in your future, a step toward your next success,” Hulshult said, “not an end in itself.”
Before graduating from HOPE, students are required to fill out a college application and a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form.
“That gets them to thinking that maybe they can do this,” Vereker said.
The pennants also give Vereker a chance to help students overcome some of the stigma they may have coming into the program .
“I had a young man come in here the other day who was very concerned that he’d been sent here because his dad told him that this was the place where bad kids go,” Vereker said. “But these aren’t bad kids. Just kids that need help. Without this program, they’d already be out on the street.”
Every diploma has a story
The HOPE school is home to about 150 students, all of them going there because they haven’t been able to succeed in the mainstream system.
Stormy Newman got caught up in the drama of high school, but not on the stage. She got into conflicts that escalated into a fight where she said she was jumped by a group of girls.
“What was I supposed to do? Let them keep hitting me?” she said. “I’m not the girl that’s going to let somebody walk all over me, so I got in trouble for fighting back.”
She found the quiet, laid-back, work at your pace atmosphere at the Hamilton Education Center more to her style, so she stayed.
Corey May, 20, was all set to go in the U.S. Army after graduating from high school, but a pair of seizures in the summer before his senior year not only eliminated that option, but started a downhill slide in his life in general, he said.
He dropped out in September and moved out of his family’s home, but found he couldn’t make ends meet on his own. So he went to summer school and enrolled in HOPE to get his last credits and to take intervention classes to help him pass the science section of the Ohio Graduation Test.
He anxiously awaits the results of his sixth attempt, which he took last month.
“To pass this time would be a big burden off me,” he said. “Six times is enough. If I didn’t, I guess I’ll still be in high school.”
Diego Rivera, 15, is trying to catch up so he can start regular high school in the 10th grade next year.
Rivera said he was a straight-A student at Jefferson Elementary, but by the time he got to sixth grade, he thought he was smart enough and let his boredom lead to trouble.
“By the eighth grade, I got out of hand and they expelled me,” he said. “I was just causing too much trouble, so I got kicked out.”
Cha-Terricca Smiley flunked the seventh grade and also came to HOPE to catch up, but is now in her third year because she can get her work done there. That is, it separates her from her friends.
“I was always in trouble for my behavior, goofing around with my friends,” she said. “I don’t want to go to school with them now. They get me in trouble. I like it here.”
Vereker and Hulshult said that one thing most students have in common when they first come to HOPE is in seeing the big picture. They want to graduate from high school, but they’ve fallen so far behind, or they’re so burdened with family problems from caring for their own children, their siblings or even their parents that they can’t see that success in school comes one day at a time.
“So another key is to set short-term goals, to go through the process step by step,” Vereker said. “Students here haven’t had success, so they need short-term goals so that they know what success is, so then we can start working on the long-term.”
The staff at HOPE have a “whatever it takes” attitude, Hulshult said, which sometimes begins at just getting them to come to school.
Whatever it takes
There are no bells at the Hamilton Education Center, no horsing around in the hallways, no tolerance for fighting and violence.
“We try to keep things understated,” Hulshult said. When the time comes to move onto something else, everyone just moves.
As for the security cameras, “They know that they’re always supervised,” she said. “Some of them feel safer because of it. We don’t give it a chance to escalate. We keep it to, 'Come in and do what you need to do.’ ”
Hulshult said that when she found out the school was going to be moved to its current home in a quiet residential neighborhood, she started knocking on doors, telling people what was going on.
Some were concerned that because of the nature of the school there would be trouble.
“I told them they didn’t have to worry,” she said. “The last thing these kids want to do is hang around the school. When their day is over, they’re gone.”
There are two three-hour sessions, morning and afternoon, at HOPE. Students also have the option of doing work at home, if there’s a reason, but getting them to come to school every day is a big step toward success.
“This is a smaller environment where they are noticed every day,” Hulshult said. “If they don’t come to school, we send an attendance officer to their home. If we need to take them to court, we’ll do that, too.
“Whatever it takes to get them here, that’s what we do,” she said.
But when they’re here, they’re given an environment that the staff hopes will allow them to overcome whatever issues brought them here and allow them to succeed.
“It takes a special kind of person to be an alternative teacher,” Hulshult said. “You can’t just put anybody in there and expect them to be successful.
“Alternative teachers have to think in the gray while still providing structure, reducing the drama and focusing on academics.
“Some of these students face situations that none of us can imagine. We had a girl who was living in her car. We didn’t know because she came in to school in clean clothes every day.
“Alternative teachers don’t take things personally,” she said. “They understand that whatever issues the student has, it’s the student’s issue, not ours.
“I could yell at a student and tell them that they’ve made a mistake, but that doesn’t help anybody. Instead we simply talk about what happened and see where they’re coming from. We ask them that if they could rewind the tape, where do you see that you might have been able to do it differently. We tell them we want you to come back to school even if you got expelled, to say 'You do have a consequence, but I want us both to succeed.’ ”
That kind of in-your-face devotion seems to work for a lot of the students.
“The only reason I come to school is I have a teacher here to tell me I have to do it,” Griselda Guitierrez said. “It’s hard to focus at home. At school, I know there’s somebody there to tell us how to do it.”
“The biggest reward is to know that you’re helping someone,” Vereker said. “Every day I come to school, the sun is shining. You never know what’s going to happen, but you know you’re going to help someone out.”
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