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Beating the Odds

10 Super Students

Beating the Odds

10 Super Students

    Can you imagine studying chemistry on an empty stomach? Think you can write an A+ essay in the middle of bereaving? How well would you do on a take-home quiz completed in the bathroom with the shower running, the quietest place in the house?
    Oakland is no stranger to poverty and crime, and its public school system is bankrupt and inadequate in many ways. Yet, in this city, in its halls of learning, are precious jewels of promise. Thousands of children are transcending their environment and braving through adversity to excel in school.
    These 10 exceptional students are shining examples. The high school seniors, all headed for additional education, are scholastic successes, never mind the hardship (self-inflicted or otherwise) in their lives. They are performers in the classroom, models among their peers and servants in their community.
    Their achievements should be celebrated, their perseverance highlighted. But, sometimes obscured by the hard-knock reputation of their city, they go largely
unnoticed and underappreciated—until now.

Jerry Phongphoumy

Intended Major: Undecided
FYI: Jerry is a rapper and DJ whose favorite artist is the late singer Aaliyah.

    One look at Jerry Phongphoumy’s grades, and you’ll think he’s a model student. He’s just shy of being a 4.0 student at Life Academy, and he’s an active participant in the East Bay Consortium’s Pre-Collegiate Academy.
    One look at Jerry’s attire, and you’ll think he’s a knucklehead. He’s a break dancing, hip-hop junkie in baggie clothes.
    Jerry wants people to know both can be equally true.
    “When they look at me,” Jerry says, “when they see the way I dress, they probably think, ‘He’s hella ghetto.’ But when they look at my grades, they realize looks can be deceiving.”
    Jerry is serious about hip-hop, especially break dancing. He has traveled as far as Sacramento to battle other breakers.
    But Jerry is equally serious about his education, which is why his parents permit such creative freedom; which is also why, as much as it hurts, last January’s loss of his cousin Denny Dhongsaly—his hip-hop mentor, his confidant—won’t deter his educational goals.
    “It’s hard,” says Jerry, who wants to go to UCLA or UC San Diego. “He was like my brother.”

Porshia Butler

Intended Major: Business
FYI: Not only does Porshia want to get into real estate, but she also wants to get her master’s degree in social work from Norfolk State University in Virginia.

    Porshia Butler, 17, considers the first 11 years of her life a mystery. She doesn’t remember her mom, who died when Porshia was 3, and she hardly knew her father, who died when she was 7. As a foster kid, she doesn’t have very many childhood memories, or much family to fill in the blanks.
    “That part of my life is a question mark,” Porshia says. “I know I’m never going to know.”
Instead of using her situation as an excuse, Porshia excels. She’s a 4.0 student at Castlemont who burns her energy working in the community: for Youth Uprising, for the Hurricane Katrina Committee, for the Senior Committee, for the School Site Council, for the city of Oakland.
    She says she plans to continue her community involvement after she gets her bachelor’s degree (she’s gunning for Cal) and master’s at Norfolk State, after she becomes a successful businesswoman. Her goal is to create enough good memories so that the ones she doesn’t have won’t matter.
    “I want a better life.”

Deborah Lee

Intended Major: Sociology
FYI: Deborah has played in the Oakland Youth Orchestra since her freshman year and has toured internationally.

    Deborah Lee, 17, is one of those perfect students.
    But not because she has a cumulative 4.0 GPA at the College Preparatory School and is a National Merit Scholarship finalist. Not because she was admitted early into Brown’s eight-year medical program, or because she plays the violin for senior citizens at Berkeley Pines Care Center.
    What has made her perfect is the acceptance of her imperfection—being the only child of a single mom while surrounded by traditional families at school; not having contact with her father (who lives in Korea) for several years; being one who gets “stressed out more than any other person in the world.”
    Rather than retreating into a shell, she reaches out to others, starting programs like the Music for Sudan project. Instead of masking her adversities, she embraces them as uniqueness.
    “I’ve grown to appreciate my quirky Korean childhood, especially my grandfather, Seyol Kang.” says Deborah, who wants to work in Korea as a medical professional, a social worker, a translator and a musician. 
    The result is a confident, talented, intelligent, community-conscious student.
    Perfect.

Medina Gbotoe

Intended Major:  Undecided
FYI: Medina went to middle school in Memphis, Tenn., for two years before moving to California.

    She’s fine, emotionally, until she gets on the phone with her kid sister, baby brother and mother, who are all back in Liberia. It is then Medina Gbotoe, 17, realizes how much she misses her family, how much she misses the better quality of life, how much she misses home.
    “When my mom gets on the phone, she starts crying, then I start crying,” she says. “I miss Africa.”
    Most days, Medina’s schedule is filled. She crams extracurricular activities—
college preparations and her duties as a leader in the program Youth Together— into a couple of hours after school. Her father wants her home by a certain time, and she has cooking, cleaning and
studying to do.
    Medina has a 3.9 GPA at Castlemont and has already been accepted to Mills College (she’s waiting on word from Davis and Cal). She fights off the longing, the loneliness, by focusing on the reason she came to America, the reason she and father left financial comfort for a one-bedroom apartment in East Oakland: her education. Medina hopes to become a doctor, ultimately returning to Africa to help in the medical field, perhaps opening a clinic.

Mark Twain Feria

Intended Major: Math or Medicine
FYI: Mark’s uncle, Danny, was reading a Mark Twain novel and convinced Mark’s parents to name their newborn after the great American author.

    The pressure is on for Mark Twain Feria.
    As an only child, he bears the burden of validating his parents’ decision to emigrate from the Philippines. He alone is responsible for capitalizing on the hard work of his mother and father, West Oakland residents who make ends meet with jobs at the Grocery Outlet and Walgreens.
    To that, Mark says, “No pressure. It’s just that I get lonely sometimes, because I don’t have any siblings to take care of or to look up to me.”
    He’s certainly making headway on his task of seizing the opportunity. He’s a 4.0 student at McClymonds. He’s already been accepted to Long Beach State, and he’s hoping for similar good news from Cal and San Francisco State. Participating in the Key Club has helped him overcome severe social anxiety, which was the result of English being his second language. Now, he’s the treasurer of the Key Club and tutors classmates in math and physics.
    “I know that in order to get better in something,” Mark says, “it requires hard work and dedication and, in my case, self-motivation.”

Michael Bradley

Intended Major: Biomedical engineering
FYI: Michael started a skateboard team and is part of a rap group.

    Michael Bradley, 17, made sure to circle the block, so no one would see he was living in a motel.
But, eventually, someone found out, and word spread that his family was holed up in a North Oakland hovel.
    The ridicule was relentless.“Night after night, I would go home and cry myself to sleep,” Michael says, “until one day, I decided that I wouldn’t let something as small as where I lived and what people thought of me pull me down.”
    Michael responded by directing his focus towards school. He studied so hard that he was promoted to
Algebra 2. He was drawn to math, science and computers and has become so adept in those fields that he is the de facto engineer at McClymonds High, where he’s the No. 3–ranked male in his class. Michael is hoping to get into Texas A&M.
    The Bradleys have since recovered financially. They live in a house about a block from the motel-the perfect motivation.

Christina Griffin

Career Path: Hospitality
FYI: Christina says her specialty is steak. Her secret? Good seasoning. Her steaks are never too juicy and never dry; they’re “perfect.”

    Christina Griffin, 18, is a product of West Oakland. She attends Dewey Academy, a continuation school
in Oakland, and she isn’t headed for a university.
    If you’ve already categorized Christina as an inner-city casualty, you’d be mistaken. Rather, she is evidence that hope floats in these parts. Christina acknowledges she was headed nowhere; now she’s headed to Professional Culinary Institute in Campbell on a $33,000 scholarship.
    “I didn’t want to settle for what’s around me,” Christina says. “I just didn’t want to settle.”
    Since age 5, she was cooking next to her grandmother, Ella Tate, her closest friend. The death of her grandmother some five years ago crushed her. She stopped going to school and started “being a bad girl, looking for trouble with my friends.”
    But Christina has turned it around in school, recently making the honor roll at Dewey, and will soon begin chasing her dream of opening her own restaurant.

Janice Andrade

Intended Major: Undecided
FYI: Since the ninth grade, Janice has earned her lunch money and bought her own clothes by working a weekend job at Ben & Jerry’s at Jack London Square.

    Janice Andrade, 18, doesn’t get home from school until 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., if she can help it. At home, peace and quiet are rare, and there are too many distractions and responsibilities with her family of nine for her to keep up her 3.9 GPA. So, after school, Janice studies, fills out college and scholarship applications, tutors and participates in after-school programs at Life Academy.
    Unfortunately, one of her responsibilities is gone. Her mom, Virginia, died on Feb. 9 from kidney failure and liver cirrhosis. Janice helped take care of her mother for the better part of 10 years. It was a part of her routine.
    “I have to be active,” Janice says. “Besides exercise, I relieve stress by joining activities and do what I can
to get my mind off of things.”
    So she presses on, likely to Cal or UCLA or UC Santa Cruz. That’s what her peers expect. That’s what her family in her native Philippines expects. That’s what her mom would have expected.

Bycha Buxton

Intended Major: Business
FYI: The name Bycha (pronounced By-Shay) comes from the Southern coastal
Gullah dialect and means “gift from God.”

    A bullet through the leg doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it was for Bycha Buxton, a senior at MetWest High.
    A good student (3.0 GPA) from a stable family, he was enticed by the notion of fast money in the streets—until a few months ago, when he was taking apart a gun and it went off, sending a bullet through his calf. Bycha eventually found himself in jail on a weapons charge.
    “To me it was karma,” he says. “I was doing some scandalous stuff to people, so some scandalous stuff happened to me.”
    A month or so locked up, followed by house arrest, slowed Bycha down and shifted his focus—so much so that the College Track program decided to keep Bycha after the incident and is preparing him for college (Howard University, he hopes). He’s still pulling a B average, and he’s doing an internship at Home Mortgage Center, where he is learning about loans and real estate.
    “He is definitely more focused toward his goals,” said Murrell Green, academic affairs director at College Track. “He uses his negative experiences as his greatest motivation, which I think is good.”

Keith Doelling

Intended Major: Neuroscience
FYI: Keith is a bassist, pianist, composer and singer who was honored as a role model driving black history month by Cragmont Elementary, where he performed for fourth-graders.

    Keith Doelling, 18, has two houses, but it’s much more burdensome than it sounds. He alternates living with his mother in Oakland and father in Berkeley, spending a week with each.
    “Basically, I live out of a suitcase,” Keith says. “It’s kind of like each week, you’re going to camp.”
    Such a situation may not sound especiallyhard. But try juggling residences while pulling a 3.96 cumulative GPA at the College Preparatory School, scoring a 2160 on the SAT (out of 2400), and
serving as principal bassist in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.
    Keith acknowledges that life in transitionis rough, and experiencing his parents’ divorce still moves him to get lost in the music of Talib Kweli and Mos Def. So, you’ll have to excuse him for popping his collar a bit when he’s at USC or Rice or Penn, his top choices, doing research on the human brain and furthering his music career.
    “I’m really proud of myself for getting where I am,” he says. “I think it’s a big deal, for me at least.”