[Urban America] From poverty to prosperity

from The Long Beach Press-Telegram

18-year-old beats the odds, graduates despite life's hardships.
By Rachel Uranga, Staff writer

LOS ANGELES -- Brian Reynolds was never really a child. Before he started first grade, he watched his father hustle drugs.

By his 8th birthday, he had moved in with his grandmother, where he rotated between sleeping on the couch and the floor in a crowded, three-bedroom South Los Angeles duplex.

Now, while many of his childhood playmates are in jail, on drugs or dead, the 18-year-old is heading off to Temple University with aspirations of opening his own business.

“It's a wonderful feeling to know that I beat the odds when there are so many out there that didn't,” Reynolds said.

Donning a black cap and gown, Reynolds will graduate from Taft High School today with a 3.7 grade-point average.

With about half of Los Angeles Unified School District's black and Latino seniors failing to graduate on time, he is a statistical oddity coming from poverty to create a future, a world he never saw in his own life.

His South L.A. neighborhood, a once-storied African-American jazz district on the outskirts of downtown, now sends its children to a poorly performing high school where 94 percent qualify for a federally funded lunch program for the poor and the dropout rate is considerably higher than the district's average.

Raised by his 61-year-old maternal grandmother, Reynolds entered into one of the district's busing programs in junior high school.

The program provides 6,600 children from underperforming schools with one predominant ethnic group with transportation to an ethnically diverse and academically stronger school.

“He is one of those that realized he could get out of the hood through the education.

It sounds like a cliche but it's the truth,” said Bridget Brownell, a health education teacher who early on befriended Reynolds.

Every school day for the past six years, Reynolds rose at 5:30 a.m. to ready himself for the 28-mile, 90-minute bus trip.

During his bleary-eyed passage along the city's traffic-choked freeways, Reynolds entered into a different world where students speak Spanish, Farsi and Mandarin, where the gangs from around his tattered home seemed to disappear, and where, for better or worse, there are fewer reminders of home.

Freshman year, he joined the basketball team and vowed to keep his head in his books rather than roam the streets with his childhood friends.

“I just wanted to make my grandmother proud,” he said.

Nobody in his immediate family had graduated from college and the idea seemed far off.

But by his junior year, he had gotten all A's with one B, and he was eager to share the good news with his father, whom he rarely saw.

But he never got a chance. When he called, his dad cut short the phone call, promising to see him over the weekend. The next day, he learned his father had died of natural causes. He was 37.

“I didn't want to go on,” Reynolds said, adding that setbacks like his father's death often derail many teens from reaching their potential. “But I just picked myself out and I am going to come out on top.”