“I
decided that my education was the most important thing that I could ever have,
because without your education, you can’t do much in this world. Some people
find out the hard way. I did not want to be one of those people.”
Seventeen-year-old high school
senior Diamond May is devoted to her education. She takes all college-level classes
in her school’s demanding International Baccalaureate program, where her grade
point average last year was a 3.8. Her favorite subjects are math, biology,
psychology, and “Theory of Knowledge,” and she’s considering forensic science,
mechanical engineering, and architecture as possible careers. Diamond also
lives in southeast Washington, D.C., one of the most poverty- and
violence-stricken neighborhoods in our nation’s capital—and was homeless for
part of her sophomore year and nearly all of her junior year.
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Diamond May 2014 Beat The Odds Scholar |
At a time when many other
college-bound students’ biggest worry was prepping for the SAT, Diamond had
evenings where she, her mother, and younger brother were unsure whether they’d
arrive at the local shelter in time to have a roof over their heads. When they
first became homeless they doubled up with relatives and then stayed with
friends where Diamond shared a small space with two adults and five
preschoolers. During those days she spent as much time at school as she
possibly could—“I would get to school at 8:00 and I wouldn’t leave until school
closed and they told me I had to go home, because I could focus there and get
work done.”
When the temperature dropped
dramatically last January, the District of Columbia was required to find
shelter for all those on the waiting list. Diamond’s family was assigned space
at a motel outside the city, where Diamond had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. to travel
an hour and a half by public transportation in order to arrive on time and stay
at her beloved public school. When that facility was forced to close her family was
moved to the D.C. General Homeless Shelter for Families with Children. A former
abandoned hospital, the squalor and desperation in the shelter made national
headlines after eight-year-old Relisha Rudd went missing just days before
Diamond’s family moved in. In the wake of that tragedy, newly-enforced rules
dictated that parents and children had to arrive at and leave the shelter together.
One of Diamond’s biggest challenges was rearranging her own academic and
after-school activities every day in order to coordinate with her mother and brother.
Yet through it all Diamond actually increased her academic performance—while
many of her peers never had any idea what her family was going through.
On November 18th Diamond
and four other extraordinary D.C.-area high school seniors will be honored with
the Children’s Defense Fund’s Beat the Odds® award and a scholarship for
college, given each year to students who have overcome great odds stacked
against them to excel academically and give back to their communities. Diamond’s
phenomenal high school counselor Nigel Jackson describes her this way: “She has
a warrior spirit. She is humble and she’s focused, and she has a goal, and when
she faces circumstances, she attacks and she fights, and it’s an internally
driven fight . . . Most people don’t persevere through this upheaval that she’s
faced and circumstances that she’s faced, and not only has she persevered, but
she’s thrived.” And he expands on the odds Diamond and children like her are
fighting against every day:
“There’s been breakdown in the
family. There’s been poverty. There’s been homelessness. So all of what we call
risk factors, you can apply to every facet of Diamond’s experience . . .
children who grow up in a community that is under-resourced, where all of the
public schools are underperforming, where there’s crime, violence, where people
experience trauma, where there’s loss, they are essentially being prepared to fail.
At best, they’ve been prepared to fail, and at worst, they’ve been prepared to
die. Our students treat death like it’s a common occurrence. They haven't been
taught that they’re allowed to grieve. They’ve been taught that they have to
tolerate trauma. And when you consider all those circumstances, she has beaten
the odds because she’s not just alive but she’s thriving, and she's performing,
and she’s considering a long life for herself, and she’s set long goals, and
she doesn’t see herself as small, or a victim, or minor. She sees herself as a
diamond.”
I am so proud of Diamond, the other four young women the Children’s
Defense Fund will honor on November 18th, and the millions of other
children like them who are forced to endure circumstances many adults could not
imagine. Please consider joining us or supporting other Children’s Defense Fund
Beat the Odds programs across the
country or honoring a parent, grandparent, teacher, or mentor by providing a
college scholarship in their honor. So many children need help escaping the
poverty and violence and homelessness and unequal schools that are setting them
up to fail. They have never been taught that they, too, are diamonds.
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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.
Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.
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