The school band played "Pomp and Circumstance." The girls donned rhinestone-bejeweled caps and sparkly stilettos. And a nervous announcer offered the students a pre-ceremony warning: If you don't tell me how to pronounce your name, I'll get it wrong.
It was a typical high school graduation, except this one took place last week. The Montebello Unified School District gave 104 students a second chance to make up lost credits, pass the exit exam and receive a diploma.
"We figure if they have a discouraging experience at the end of high school, they'll never continue on," Board of Education member Gerri Guzman said.
Among the graduates: a self-described troublemaker who struggled with math and fell further behind when his mother got deported; a girl from Jalisco who four years earlier had stepped on campus knowing only one word of English ("hello"); and a girl who found out on graduation day last June that she wouldn't participate because she had failed government class.
Montebello High School's auditorium looked like a box of crayons that night. Rows of students wearing different colored gowns represented the district's high schools: Bell Gardens, Montebello, Schurr, Vail and Community.
After an introduction of the school board members and a few words from its president, the emcee asked the first row of students to stand and make their way toward the stage.
As he watched a blur of camera flashes and handshakes, Germain Estrada, 20, waited with wide eyes. Thoughts of the last several years whirled through his mind.
He thought about the friends that he'd picked and the classes — especially math — that he'd ditched.
His dad wasn't around and his mom worked long hours. By his junior year, he was missing so many credits that he was enrolled in an alternative school. Then, his floundering academics took another blow: His mother was deported to Mexico.
Estrada whispered as he remembered those days. "That really put me down completely," he said. "Completely."
Eventually, though, things changed. He lived with his brother, Edwin, who was only a year older. He watched him sacrifice his dream of culinary school to work two jobs and support them.
"That woke me up. It snapped me out of my element," Estrada said. "It's like, 'You have to do this. It's for your mom. It's for your brother.' "
But it was for himself too.
"I was always the troublemaker type. A lot of people said I wasn't going to make it," Estrada said. "So I got up on my feet and did what I had to do."
He started going to his classes and taking extra ones after school.
As he walked to the front of the auditorium, he heard his family's cheers. He waited until his hand gripped the diploma and then he smiled, scanned the crowd and nodded to them.
Sitting nearby, Marta Vargas looked on in awe of her younger sister, who in a few years had accomplished something she had long tried to do: learn English.
After their mom died of cancer, her then-15-year-old sister, Maria Pelayo, moved from Mexico to live with her and her husband.
When she moved here, the thin teenager with olive skin and big, brown eyes could speak only Spanish, and she had trouble passing the English portion of the mandatory exit exam her senior year.
Pelayo vividly remembers the day she found out she had passed.
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