AFTER THE VISITORS LEFT, Isaias retreated to his room.1 The sky outside was dark as he used his smartphone to send a Facebook message to Bianca Tudon, the student whose picture appeared in the Victory University brochure.
Hello. You really don’t know me. My name is Isaias Ramos.
He reminded her he was Dennis’ brother, then said he needed advice about Victory. I’m really trying to weigh all my options, and I can’t really afford to waste too much time in my life.
About half an hour later, his cell phone sounded with a musical Zing! A little photo of Bianca popped onto the screen, with a message. Hey. Yes I remember you. I just saw you at Jerry’s Sno Cones lol. Anyway, yes I will tell you all I know.
She told him he’d have to take a religion class, that the classes were small and challenging, that she recommended honors courses, that teachers were willing to work with students one-on-one, that the food was okay, the student center was tiny, and the library was small, too.
Isaias lay facedown on his bed as they exchanged more messages. He said he hadn’t noticed her at the frozen treat stand. He wrote: I suppose I’m interested in a business degree or something similar. What are you majoring in? Do you know anything about the “business”department of Victory? Do your classes interfere much with work? it would be awesome if you let me see some of your syllabi. Things like campus size and food don’t bother me. I would definitely go for honors courses if you think it would help. And I don’t get sore about religion, so that class won’t be a problem. It’s great that you’re pointing all of this out to me, I truly appreciate it. I suppose the biggest obstacle then would be money. If the question doesn’t bother you, How did you afford it?
Zing! Bianca replied: I got a scholarship. Must have a 3.5 GPA on transcript and above a 23 or 25 to qualify for the Trinity Honors Scholarship.
The numbers referred to ACT scores. She continued:
It will pay for everything except books. That is where Dr. Hostutler comes in. He is a History teacher at Victory but he is also the founder of the Trinity Scholarship.
Isaias wrote: Wow cool, do you know when he works? Maybe I could go visit him. I really wasn’t planning on going to college and so I didn’t apply yet or anything, but this looks like a really good option. I’ll see if I can apply and do all of that, and if I get the Trinity Scholarship then that will be awesome. I suppose the books are a concern, but a small one. How does the schedule fit you?
It was already nearly 11:00 p.m., but they kept sending messages. Bianca had said she’d put him in touch with a friend who was studying business. She wrote: I had never considered Victory University but I am very grateful to be there now. I am getting a decent education for free. And the lady that signed me up told me that I was wasting my life lol. that pretty much pushed me into signing up.…
Isaias tapped out another message: I think you’re absolutely right about getting decent education. That’s my biggest concern, right up there with costs. I would not want to waste anyone’s time and money if I don’t get back what I put [in].
More messages, then it was past 11:00 p.m. Isaias sent one more, thanking her. Zing! She wrote back: no problem. no worries. I am glad to help
goodnight
The next day, Margot Aleman sent a text message to everyone who’d been at Isaias’ house the night before.
Isaias Ramos is going to college!!! I am taking him to Victory today at 3:30 pm!! Thank you!!!!
Jacklyn Martin texted too. I’m SO FREAKING happy.:-)
But the visit to Victory brought no guarantees. Isaias still had to earn the scholarship, and the following day—24 hours before Kingsbury’s graduation—he pulled out a composition book and began jotting notes for an application essay. He typed the essay on the family computer. “My parents have always been hard workers, and they never wanted that same fate for my brothers and I,” he wrote. “My father always wanted a university education for me. Money has always been tight with us, and it is one of the reasons for my application to Victory. Victory University is one of the few institutions willing to help students like me, us students from a foreign background and a middle-class family. It’s difficult to explain how grateful I am for just having a shot at a free education.… I never wanted to be a burden on my parents, and I never wanted to lay the responsibility of a college tuition on them, which is why I am striving to receive the Presidential Scholarship. However, this decision to attend Victory University is not my parents’; it is my own.
“Learning has always been a passion of mine. I am absolutely in love with learning and expanding my mind beyond my comfort zone.”
Jacklyn Martin would read the essay later and see it as evidence that her hunch about Isaias was true—he did want to attend college but did not want to risk disappointment.
* * *
Around the same time, other Kingsbury seniors were doing makeup work in a last-ditch attempt to graduate. Sometimes the sessions went late into the night.
“Mr. Fuller gonna try real hard not to fail you,” the principal said, referring to himself in the third person. “But what some of the kids will tell you—if you’re graduating on a Saturday, you’ve probably been with me all night Friday.” He said he insisted that in these sessions, the students actually do the work, and do it right.
On the Saturday afternoon of the graduation ceremony, a dark brown horse pulled a carriage down the street past the crowd of Kingsbury students outside the grand old Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis.2 The annual Memphis in May barbecue contest was taking place just down the street. Foot traffic was heavy, bottles of water were on sale for $1, and old trolleys rumbled by from time to time, bells clanging.
Isaias joined other students lining up in a room, out of view. The Ramos family members found places in the red velvet seats. I asked Dennis what he thought of the counselors’ visit earlier that week. “I wasn’t impressed really because I have seen things like that before,” he said. “And a lot of people came and talked to me and offered me help but because I didn’t have any form of identification, they couldn’t help me really. So I wasn’t impressed.”
Dennis said the family wanted to buy houses, renovate them, rent them out or resell them. He said they’d just put in an application to buy another house in the neighborhood for $11,000. “We want to invest, we want to become strong as a family. And we just don’t need a degree for that. We just don’t.” If he ever went back to school, it would be for fun, for the love of learning. “Not because I need the education. Rather that I want it.”
I had heard almost the exact words before—from Isaias. As the big brother, Dennis had played a profound role in shaping Isaias’ character, from his atheism to his taste in music. And unlike Isaias’ parents, he wasn’t showing the same support for his education.
As Dennis spoke, the school orchestra struck up “Pomp and Circumstance.” Dah-dah-da da daaa daaa. Magaly, dressed in her black orchestra t-shirt, was playing the big double bass. The audience members stood up as the graduates began walking onto the stage, wearing robes and mortarboards in maroon, the Kingsbury color, with white scarf-like stoles. As a top ten student, Isaias took a place in the front row of the brightly lit stage, smiling. Leonard Duarte, the valedictorian, looked straight ahead as the others filed in and took seats behind them.
The student orchestra switched to the national anthem. In the audience, Dennis, Mario and Cristina held their hands over their hearts. Mario told Dustin to do the same.
Then came speeches, and Isaias and the other students walked across the stage and shook hands with Mr. Fuller one by one. The families in the audience ignored the warnings to hold their applause and shouted for their kids.
(Photo by Karen Pulfer Focht/The Commercial Appeal)
The last student crossed the stage, the graduates began to cheer, and Mr. Fuller began to pump his fists. Some students threw their hats into the air. “Don’t lose your hats yet, children,” he said, and told them to calm down.
“This has been a challenging yet rewarding group,” he said, adding that he’d make them follow policy until the very last second. “For some of my children, we had to work the last second of the last day to get here. But we’re here.”
The students cheered. Mr. Fuller finished by repeating some of the catchphrases he used on the morning announcements each day.
“Surround yourself with…”
“Positive people!” the students shouted.
“Every decision you make will have a negative or…”
“Positive consequence!”
“Whether it is positive or negative depends on…”
“You!”
“So please make good…”
“Decisions!”
“I told you these kids were smart, because they come from the school of scholars and . .”
“Champions!”
“Where every day is 90-60…”
“Thirty!” they shouted, recognizing the reference to the test score goals.
“At this time…” Mr. Fuller began, and the cheers drowned out his instructions. Isaias turned the tassel on his cap, threw the hat into the air and whooped, his face joyous.
It was around this time that Estevon Odria began crying with a frightening intensity. Later, he couldn’t really explain his overwhelming reaction. “Because I’m sad, but I’m happy. I was emotional…’cause this year’s been crazy. Because it’s crazy, a lot of stuff going on. Just crazy.”
After the ceremony, the Ramos family caught up with Isaias in the crowd outside the Orpheum Theater, and Mario took several pictures. He handed me his cell phone so I could take a picture of all five of them. Their expressions were serious, just as they had been in Walmart roughly a decade earlier.
Margot Aleman found Isaias, too, wrapped him in a hug, and held him for a long time. And then Isaias found Magaly. They embraced on the sidewalk and ran off together through the hazy air, toward the Mississippi River.
* * *
In the days after graduation, Rigo the goalie and the rest of the Kingsbury soccer team traveled to Murfreesboro for the state championship tournament. They’d lost many games in mid-season, but now they were winning, and they fought their way to the title game for schools their size. On a sunny day on a green field, Kingsbury’s multicultural squad in maroon jerseys faced Christian Academy of Knoxville, a mostly white team in white jerseys. In the first half, a player from the other team scored against Rigo. Then Kingsbury player Aro Nebk, who came from Sudan, was thrown out of the game. The official reason: foul language directed at a referee. Aro said he’d cursed in frustration when another player stepped on his foot, but he said he hadn’t directed the curse at the referee. Aro got a red card, which meant that for the rest of the game, Kingsbury had to play with ten players rather than the normal eleven.
At halftime the Kingsbury players looked badly discouraged, their bodies slumped. Jose Perez, the JROTC leader and soccer player who longed to become a Marine, tried to fire them up. “Come on, guys! It matters so much more to us.”
The second half began, and another shot got past Rigo, putting Kingsbury down 2–0. But Rigo kept playing hard. When one opposing player threatened to score, Rigo ran forward and blocked the player’s path to the goal. The opponent kicked the ball right into Rigo’s body, and it bounced off harmlessly. Kingsbury player Tony Marquez shot a goal late in the second half, bringing the score to 2–1. “This has to be the turning point!” player Franklin Paz Arita yelled. But Kingsbury’s follow-up attacks came to nothing.
A siren went off—woo-woo-woo! Time was up. The players from the other team exploded in giddy, whooping celebration. The Kingsbury players sank into deeper misery. Jose sobbed and wiped away tears, not bothering to hide them. He would never play a high school soccer game again. Nor would Rigo, who came off the field with a leg injury, limping and grimacing, helped by an assistant coach. Principal Fuller had traveled to the game, and now he quietly consoled the players with handshakes and embraces.
For the third year in a row, Kingsbury’s soccer team had to settle for second place. The athletes didn’t care that they’d played against some of the strongest teams in the state and had proven themselves among the best. The only thing that mattered was that when they made it to the final game, they lost.
Early in the year, Rigo had faced numerous questions. Would he keep his grades up? Would he go into the military? Would he go to college? Would he win the soccer championship?
Now, in the waning days of May, all those questions had been answered, and the answer to each was the same.
No.
More than two years later, I asked Rigo why he’d failed to graduate with his class. “Mainly my loss of concentration,” he said. He was 20 when we spoke again and said he was trying to offer advice to a younger nephew who was skipping school much like he had, a nephew who would say things like, “School is not for me, and I’m not for school.”
Rigo wanted something different for his nephew because his own end of high school was a source of embarrassment. “Because whenever people ask me about my school, I usually tell them I graduated with my class. And I feel ashamed of myself because I didn’t. I should have, but I didn’t. And I don’t want him to feel the same thing as I did.”
Rigo told me that after failing the exam with Mr. Tuminaro, he’d gone to summer school, taken the two English courses again and passed. But he still needed one more credit for a personal finance course. He said that in 2015, he finally completed his diploma at Gateway, the Christian school that served as a backup option for so many students in the neighborhood. Through it all, Rigo had worked. He was now earning $15 per hour on a carpentry crew led by two of his brothers.
Rigo’s father told me that in the months after the end of high school, his son hid the real reasons why he hadn’t yet received his diploma. “He told me a lot of things that weren’t so,” Mr. Navarro said, explaining that it was easy to keep the truth from him because he couldn’t speak or read English. Rigo’s dad finally went to the school and spoke with someone through an interpreter. “And there, they told me all the problems that Rigo had.” For his part, Rigo said he wasn’t trying to hide the truth from his father. “I was a bit mad and I didn’t want to talk about the problem.”
Mr. Navarro had only made it as far as third grade, and he wanted to see Rigo go much further. He told Rigo that if he studied, he could get a really good job, maybe in nursing, or as an accountant or a schoolteacher or dentist. Rigo’s father described these jobs as cosas sencillas—simple things—apparently underestimating how much time they would really take to learn.
Mr. Navarro wondered if he’d made the right choices. He’d taken his sons to work with him in construction, and he’d paid them, and then they’d liked the money and didn’t want to go to school anymore. “Maybe I didn’t know how to guide my children,” he said.
Mr. Navarro said he’d told Rigo that he’d lived in America and worked so hard all these years so that his nine children could go to school, so they could eat, so they could have everything. He recalled telling Rigo, “But if you don’t want to go to school anymore, I don’t have anything else to do here because you’re the youngest. And I’ll go to Mexico.” As a 62-year-old naturalized citizen, Mr. Navarro was already collecting a small Social Security retirement payment as he continued to work in construction, and the payment would go far in a low-cost country like Mexico. He also imagined working in a business that one of Rigo’s brothers was considering launching there: renting small boats to tourists who wanted a fun day on the water. Mr. Navarro and his wife were planning a temporary trip back to their old home in Tequila, Mexico, and he was trying to convince her to move back permanently.
For his part, Rigo was considering three options. First, he could keep working in Memphis and perhaps take a more senior role within the brothers’ carpentry business. Second, he could join the U.S. military. Or third, he could go to Mexico and work in his brother’s proposed boat business.
His brother would manage the boat company and study at the same time, and maybe Rigo could help with the business and study, too. Plus he could spend a lot of time at the beach! Rigo laughed, and said, “So it would work out as a great job.” He seemed intrigued with this last idea, of going to the old country to start something new.
Many possibilities had slipped away from the teenaged Rigo, but now perhaps he would choose an opportunity, grab it and hold it tightly as it pulled him into the years ahead.
* * *
Rigo wasn’t the only student who failed to graduate with the Kingsbury class of 2013. In October of that academic year, the school roster had listed 224 seniors. By graduation day, that number had dwindled to 171, representing attrition of nearly a quarter of the senior class. Moreover, the guidance staff had told me that not every student who walked across the stage would really graduate. At least 40 seniors were waiting for the results of state end-of-course exams that could affect their final grades.
The math became complex. Months would pass before the state published the final graduation rate for Isaias’ class. It was the worst in four years: 55 percent.
As always, the graduation rate was an educated guess. If the administration could show that an absent Kingsbury student had enrolled elsewhere, the student would be taken off the list of dropouts. Kingsbury administrators tried to locate missing students, but this was especially difficult if the student had moved back to the family’s home country. Or an absent student might have enrolled and started paying tuition down the street at Gateway, the Christian school, and not told Kingsbury. Mr. Fuller said that after Isaias’ senior year, he started giving students an incentive to inform the school that they’d transferred: “If you can come up and give me some Gateway paperwork, I’ll give you $5 for your gas.”
Even if you assumed that some missing Kingsbury students had earned a diploma somewhere else, a 55 percent graduation rate was still quite low, and well below that year’s goal of 67 percent.
Mr. Fuller had said his own survival in his job depended in part on improving the graduation rate. Despite the bad results for the 2013 class, Mr. Fuller said later that the school system didn’t come down hard on him. “Fact of the matter was, they kind of backed off on that a little bit. Now, we didn’t,” he said, meaning the Kingsbury leadership team. “But it was just so difficult to move the graduation rate.”
He said Kingsbury was in a tough neighborhood with tough demographics. He recalled the story of a tall white kid from a troubled family who decided in the second semester of his senior year to stop coming to school. “He was adamant. ‘I just no longer want to do this.’” White students had the worst graduation rate of all ethnic groups in Isaias’ senior class: 45 percent, compared to 55 percent for Hispanics, 58 percent for African-Americans, and 73 percent for Asians.
Mr. Fuller left Kingsbury in 2014 for reasons unrelated to the graduation rate. When I spoke with him the following year, he was working as a principal at Forrest City Junior High in Arkansas. He said that school was struggling, but he embraced the challenge. “And I love Kingsbury,” he said. “Still love it. Still bleed maroon. Put a lot of hard work into Kingsbury. Lot of hard work into Kingsbury. And we turned the corner. We made gains.”
Though Kingsbury missed its graduation rate goal in 2013, it met its state test score objectives that year on subjects including Algebra 1, Algebra 2, English 2 and English 3. For example, the school’s goal for Algebra 1 was that 47 percent would test proficient or advanced. The proportion of students who actually did it was five points higher, 52 percent. In Algebra 2, the goal was that 10 percent would test proficient or advanced, and 16 percent actually did.
Modest progress, yes, but progress all the same.
The new principal at Kingsbury High was Terry Ross, a big, broad-shouldered 43-year-old whom everyone called Dr. Ross. He said he aimed to increase the graduation rate, improve attendance, reduce suspensions and increase community engagement.
Eduardo Saggiante, the interpreter, had moved away after Isaias’ senior year. Another Spanish interpreter now worked at the school, and Dr. Ross said he was going to hire a second to go “on offense”: monitoring grades, making phone calls, tracking down missing kids and finding ways to intervene. And he planned to hire a third person to help with tutoring. Two new Hispanic teachers had joined the staff. “I’m trying to make an intentional effort to get more personnel in the school who look like the students,” said Dr. Ross, who is African-American.
Hispanics made up a greater and greater proportion of the student population at Kingsbury High—48.7 percent on the day we spoke in October 2015. Kingsbury would almost certainly make Memphis history as the first majority Hispanic high school in the area. “It matters here because if we can get it right here, then we can get it right across the country,” Dr. Ross said. He paraphrased the quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., who said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. If you treated one person wrong, that created a ripple effect. But Dr. Ross said if you tried to do the right thing for a whole group of people—for Hispanic students, for instance—that would cause a ripple effect as well, a positive one.
By the summer of 2013, the bulk of my time within Kingsbury High was over. I was about to follow the Ramos family’s story to a new, very different place.