TEENS WHO HAVE OVERCOME INCREDIBLE OBSTACLES TO SUCCEED IN SCHOOL AND LIFE

STORY BY BRITTANY NUNN | PHOTOS BY DANNY FULGENCIO

Growing up, earning good grades, pursuing a talent and gaining college acceptance is tough, but imagine doing so in the face of abject poverty or an incurable disability or while you are the primary caretaker for a dying parent and your younger siblings. Hellish circumstances can become an excuse for teens to escape down a destructive, pain-numbing path. For a few neighborhood seniors who will graduate this month, however, hardship is reason to strive for a better future. Their determination, support from teachers and administrators, and, perhaps, the iron-will derived from a fight for survival has driven them to remarkable success.

Woodrow senior Abby Quintero always lived in rough neighborhoods, but that hasn’t discouraged her from striving to become the first person in her family to go to college.

“When you live in poor neighborhoods, people always think badly about your future,” Quintero says.

She grew up speaking Spanish in her home, which kept her from being accepted into the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program for elementary school.

At home, things weren’t good for Quintero. When she was in the fourth grade, her parents got into an argument that escalated into abuse.

Quintero, her mom and her siblings moved into a women’s shelter, and Quintero had to switch schools. Her family could stay in the shelter only temporarily, and then they moved into a friend’s home, but that did not last, and they had to look for a more stable place to live.

The situation took a toll on Quintero. She learned English as quickly as possible, and by middle school her conversational English was flawless. Still, she wasn’t able to pass the test required to enter the TAG program for Alex W. Spence Middle School.

“I had a lot of burdens in my life, and that affected me,” Quintero says. “Also, I would always bomb the English part of the test, and that’s pretty essential to get into the TAG program.

“That was very unfortunate,” she recalls. “It made me feel bad about myself because it made me feel like, ‘I’m not good enough. I’m never going to be good enough because my grades are all that I have to depend on so that I can be better than what people say.’ ”

By the time Quintero reached Woodrow Wilson High School, she was frustrated with academia. During her freshman year, she began to rebel.

Not long after that she tried out for the drill team and became a Sweetheart (which is what Woodrow calls the members of its drill team) her sophomore year. Dance quickly became an outlet for her, to “distract her from everything else.”

That’s when she met Lisa Moya King, the dance teacher at Woodrow, who took notice of her.

“I could see that she was a leader because she would be dancing and everyone would be following,” King says. “I said, ‘OK, this