BUT THE 18-YEAR-OLD SUNSET HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR SAYS SHE CAN’T

Ramirez always has been that way, growing up with a single mom and younger siblings. But since her mom became ill three years ago, the high school student plays an even bigger role in ensuring that her family stays on track.

Every morning, she drives her younger siblings, 11 and 13, to middle school. Then she drives her 17-year-old brother to school at Townview and drops her cousin off at the DART train before 8 a.m. Then she’s off to school herself.

Ramirez piled on her high school credits so that this semester, she only needed three classes to graduate. Instead of hanging out or working in the afternoons, she typically is running errands, driving grandparents to doctor’s appointments, babysitting her cousin’s toddler.

“My mom always tells me I don’t have to do it, but if I see someone that needs help, I just do it,” she says. “If I say ‘no’ to somebody, I feel bad.”

Ramirez says her dad went to prison when she was 2 years old. Her mom, who is now only 34, worked as many as three jobs to keep the family afloat. One way she made do was a gig with a property management company occupying vacant rental houses in exchange for free rent, but that meant moving frequently. The children rarely stayed in the same school for more than one semester.

Things became more stable when her mom remarried, but by then, Ramirez already was a little adult.

When she was 12 or 13, Ramirez started cutting herself as a way to relieve emotional pain. Her younger sis- ter found out and told her parents, who sent Ramirez for a week of inpatient care at Hickory Trail Hospital in DeSoto, followed by a year of counseling.

“Now I talk to people who are cutting,” she says. “It was an escape from reality. It took away the pain for a little bit.”

In 2007, her mom had gallbladder surgery that went wrong. She had internal bleeding and a hematoma that was pushing on her liver. But even after those problems were corrected, she still was sick and later was diagnosed with Lupus.

Even though her mom can’t work, Ramirez says, she earns money baking and decorating cakes at home.

“There are times when she can’t walk,” Ramirez says. “But she still wants to do something.”

In addition to cooking, cleaning and shuttling family members anywhere they need to go, Ramirez is a great student, says Sunset counselor Angela Williams-McGill.

Ramirez has such an overwhelming sense of responsibility for her family that she originally had planned to forgo college and start working right after high school so that she could contribute to the household. But her mom, a high-school dropout who started having children in her teens, encouraged her to apply.

Now Ramirez is considering Texas Woman’s University and the University of North Texas at Dallas, which offered her a $30,000 scholarship. She wants to be a nurse, psychologist or social worker, she says.