Legacy Rewritten

It is disheartening to think most people believe high school dropouts are dumb or can’t learn. The truth is they encountered a situation in their childhood that forced them to grow up faster and make a hard adult decision as minors. Many of those decisions involve leaving what they know as home or being forced to get a job to help with the family’s basic needs such as food and shelter. The real shame is with the high school administration. How does an adult administrator not discourage a student from dropping out? Why didn’t they find a solution or alternative for a sixteen-year-old deciding to drop out? We all know that high school dropouts will be less likely to succeed in life. Especially minority ones who are never given a second chance. They will be stuck in low-paying positions or working illegal jobs.

Sheena was forced to drop out to get a job to help her mom pay the bills and feed her three younger siblings. Her mom didn’t want her to, but Sheena couldn’t watch her work three different minimum-wage jobs and not sleep or not eat to ensure her children had food. She promised her mother that she would one day get her GED. Sheena is now thirty-five years old with a seven-year-old son. Her mother has passed away, probably from being overworked. She is now trying to fulfill a promise that she made to her mother nineteen years ago. Her goal is to complete her GED before her son starts high school.

We chat a little more about her job and a few concerns about her housing situation. We both stand and hug. I remind her to invest one hour each day in her online GED program. However, that never happens; she usually only puts in twenty minutes every other day. I assure her that I’ll visit in two weeks and if she needs me, all she needs to do is text.

As I’m leaving the building, I see Monica entering. I wave. She gives me a half-hearted semi-wave. She is one of my former GED students who decided it was too hard to complete the online program at her own pace. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t graduate from high school at the age of eighteen. She was living with her grandmother from the age of ten to seventeen. She was entering her senior year and excited to graduate. One day, she left for school after hugging her grandmother, and when she returned, her grandmother had died from a heart attack. That one event upended a successful student’s life and made her an orphan, aka a ward of the state. She lost her housing, her school focus, and her future in one afternoon. That was the day everything ended for Monica. She was sent to live with an aunt who was a half sister of her father, whom she never knew. The aunt lived in another state.

Nine months later, the aunt died in a tragic car accident. The high school where Monica transferred said she didn’t have enough credits to graduate. The child welfare department delayed the transfer from one high school to another, and Monica eventually aged out of the system without her diploma. And no one cared—not the high school principal, teachers, or superintendent. They should have been ashamed of themselves for allowing a child to have no future. But then again, it wasn’t their child. Why would they care? Anyone who doesn’t know the hardships of a high school dropout should not be assigned to teach and impact the lives of our youth. Just because you want to teach the next generation doesn’t mean you have the capacity and sympathy to do so.

As I’m leaving the nonprofit, I slide into the driver’s seat of my car and think about my dad, who dropped out of high school in 1953 to get a job and care for his mother and four younger siblings because his father had decided not to bring his paycheck home to pay bills and buy food. My father dropped out of high school, the lily-white teachers, lily-white principal, and lily-white administration subscribed during segregation that minorities didn’t need to be educated for manual labor employment. The only reason the few minorities were permit to attend high school was because there were no Negro schools in the area. To encourage minorities to drop out, the school board wouldn’t offer school buses to those students living in the Black community, which was a mile away from the high school via the main route with no sidewalks. It’s shameful that angry white attitudes exist when teaching students. A year later, my dad returned to high school because he had fallen in love with my mother and wanted to marry her. He knew there was no way possible to take care of a wife and future children without a diploma. He obtained his diploma a year after my mother received hers, even though he is a year older than she.

This is one of those secrets that was never told to me. One day, I was looking through my mom’s cedar chest and saw their diplomas tucked under some sheets along with other important documents. I was so intrigued to see their diplomas. When I saw the graduation dates on both of them, I inquired about the discrepancy since my dad should have graduated a year before my mother. That’s when my mom told me the story about him wanting to care for his mother and siblings but also wanting to marry and create a life as a man. I never asked my dad about his year of dropping out, so when he asked for assistance to review a business document, I immediately dropped everything to support him with his request. I looked at my dad in a different light. Not many sixteen-year-olds would take on the responsibility of supporting a family by sacrificing their future.