Ìsmael Zaragoza knows he’s a work in progress.
“It’s been a struggle to stay in school,” the 18-year-old North High School senior admitted. “All my friends dropped out and started working.
“If friends are together encouraging each other to stay in school, it would be easier. If one friend leaves, another homeboy will be like, ‘Let’s go with him.”‘
Zaragoza hasn’t made that move yet. With less than a semester to go before graduation, he swears he won’t. However, the pressure on him is relentless.
When the Denver school board closed his old school, Manual High, “my dad wanted me to go to work,” Zaragoza said.
It was not an outrageous request. Zaragoza had done very little with his academic opportunities until then.
His parents were forced by poverty to drop out of middle school in Mexico. When they came to the United States, they both had to take low-wage jobs, his dad in landscaping, his mom at a laundry. The family could have used the income Zaragoza could have generated with a full-time job .
He told his folks no.
“My mom didn’t have any faith in me. I was going to show my mom and dad that I wasn’t going to drop out,” he said, sitting in his parents’ small house in Swansea, one of Denver’s poorest neighborhoods.
It is in modest structures like this that Denver’s battle with an obscenely high dropout rate will be won or lost. Zaragoza spoke about his graduation prospects in the three hours that separate his classes from his job loading and unloading trucks at UPS.
In addition to ruminating about an uncertain future, he was babysitting his 4-year-old brother, Chato. His 15-year-old sister, Araceli, would take over as soon as she arrived home from South High School. His 13-year-old sister, Alejandra, was due home soon too.
“It has to start someplace,” Zaragoza said of the education and expectation necessary to deliver him and his siblings to a better life.
If he can set an example, he knows it will be easier for them.
“My sisters will see me going forward,” he said. “They’re going to try to do the same thing.”
Then, it will be even less difficult for Chato. Already, the little boy is learning English a lot faster than his big brother, who had to enter a special English program in middle school.
“Chato won’t be in the same spot we are,” Zaragoza said of himself and his sisters.
Academic momentum is a simple concept to grasp. Achieving it is something else.
First, there is the pressure of the pack. Ask Zaragoza how many of his friends from Manual didn’t drop out when the school closed, and he comes up with two names.
“After everybody I knew dropped out, they probably thought I’d get out too,” Zaragoza said. “Now that they see that I hung on, they’re saying, ‘I should have done that.”‘
Even with the homeboys finally getting a clue, Zaragoza’s margin for error is virtually nonexistent. He must pass the civics, biology, geometry and history courses he takes at North while simultaneously working 22 hours a week.
His days start at 6 a.m. and don’t end until 10:30 or 11 at night. This is better than when he worked until midnight at a fast-food restaurant.
“I don’t have great grades,” he confided.
What he has is perspective.
Earlier this year, Zaragoza took the ACT college aptitude test. His standardized test results were no better than his grades. But like his whole educational outlook, they are a beginning, not an end.
That’s why on March 8, the Metropolitan Mayors and Commissioners Youth Awards will honor Ìsmael Zaragoza for barely scraping by in high school. He is stumbling along an academic tightrope. But he’s headed in the right direction.
Last week, he actually went to fill out some college financial aid applications at the Auraria campus.
And his whole family went with him.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
This column has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an editing error, it incorrectly stated that Ismael Zaragoza had to drop out of middle school in Mexico because of poverty. It was his parents who had to drop out of middle school.
