Lorena Ortega-Guerrero

When Oakland’s Lorena Ortega-Guerrero starts Yale University this fall, she is looking forward to breaking out of her comfort zone. “I grew up in the Bay Area and I’ve spent the majority of my life with other Latinos,” she said, “so I’m excited to push my comfort zone and get perspectives from people who have lived very different lives from myself.”

While Yale is quickly approaching, just two years ago, the 18-year-old graduate of Holy Names High School wasn’t sure she’d be able to attend college. Ortega-Guerrero’s parents, who were in the country illegally at the time, were facing deportation.

• Read more: A passion for community activism propels this LA senior to UCLA

Ortega-Guerrero knew that if they left, she’d go with them to be able to stay with her family.

Luckily, an immigration lawyer was able to stop the deportation and keep her parents in the U.S., now legally.

Growing up in Oakland, education was always a priority for Ortega-Guerrero’s family. “I’ve lived behind Oakland High School my entire life and I knew it wasn’t the life I wanted” Ortega-Guerrero says. “We always pushed and strived to get whatever help we could to go to private school.”

With the help of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, Ortega-Guerrero was connected to the BASIC Fund, a privately funded organization that allocates partial tuition funds to allow students to go to the private school of their choice.

Ortega-Guerrero’s parents enrolled her and her younger sister in a number of extracurriculars, including karate for self-defense, music lessons, and swimming.

“[My extracurriculars] were expensive, and people always asked my parents, why they were wasting their money on these classes,” she says, but the loaded schedule taught her discipline which she could then apply to her studies. “I’m so grateful to my parents because discipline and time management has been something I’ve known since I was a kid.”

Ortega-Guerrero says she pushes herself academically to show appreciation to her parents, for all they have sacrificed on her behalf. Her father is a handyman and her mother a house cleaner, so for Ortega-Guerrero, presenting her parents with a flawless transcript is her way “to pay them back. To show them their sacrifices are worth it.”

The sacrifices paid off.

Now, despite her family’s previous legal struggles, college isn’t just an option, it’s a reality. And after college? Giving back and helping others is on the agenda. “I want to do something I’m passionate about,” she says, noting that it might include a career as a civil rights lawyer, inspired by the immigration attorney who kept her family together and in the United States years ago, and kept her dream of higher education alive.

Like The 74’s Facebook page to see other notable graduates this month.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org. 

Valerie Childress with one of her four graduates at Hybrid High, Cambria Kelley.

*UPDATED

The first class to graduate from an innovative university-based charter school in Los Angeles is sending all 84 grads to four-year colleges, most with scholarships.

Valerie Childress watched her quadruplets graduate Saturday evening on the campus of the University of Southern California with tears in her eyes.

“I said I wasn’t going to cry, but I have been waiting for this moment since they were born,” Childress said outside USC’s Bovard Auditorium. “All of them are graduating and all of them are going to college. I’m so proud, and I’m so grateful to this school.”

The Childress quads are part of the first graduating class of USC Hybrid High School, an LA Unified charter school operated by Ednovate, which focuses on personalized learning. The students landed more than $5 million in scholarships and 400 acceptances from schools such as University of Pennsylvania, UC Riverside, Pepperdine, Cal State LA, California Institute of the Arts, UCLA and, yes, six to USC, which sponsors Ednovate.

The school, near downtown and on the first floor of the old Los Angeles World Trade Center, is 74 percent Latino, 22 percent black and 85 percent in lower socio-economic families. All of the graduates have completed graduate prep courses, 10 percent are “DREAMer” immigrants and 85 percent are first-generation college students in their families.

USC Hybrid High School is unique because it is a personalized college prep school where everyone has a Chromebook and teachers monitor each student’s performance every step of the way. The students learn to be self-directed and self-motivated in the schoolwork.

Ednovate has two schools in LA Unified, USC Hybrid High and USC East College Prep, which opened in Lincoln Heights this year. It will open another school in Santa Ana in Orange County in August, and two other schools have been approved to open in LA Unified in 2017.

Hybrid High seniors graduate on the USC campus.

“When I graduated here from USC there weren’t that many charter schools in the country,” said Ednovate President Oliver Sicat before the ceremonies. “The idea that I can start a charter or create a high school was not available to me at the time,” Sicat said, but he knew he wanted to intersect entrepreneurship with education, and that’s what he’s doing now with the help of his former alma mater.

“I have been thinking about this moment for quite a while, it’s the culmination of hundreds of staff members, students, parents and partners,” Sicat said. “We have created a positive multi-generational change in these families, with the first generation to attend college for most of them and trying to break the cycle of poverty.”

One of their students was homeless when she enrolled as a freshman and entered through the foster program. “She worked through some really tough conditions to transition to college prep and is now going to a four-year college on scholarship,” Sicat said.

Another student acted out by tagging bathrooms and skipping classes when they asked why he wasn’t doing his homework. He said that everyone in his family was either in auto mechanics, on drugs or in a gang. He wanted an option out of it to break the cycle.

“That student is now going to a college outside of the city,” Sicat said. “That’s one of the amazing stories that has come from here.”

Tristian and Raymundo Corona at the Hybrid High graduation ceremony.

Tristian Corona, 18, is the oldest of seven children in his family and now has a scholarship to UC Merced where he wants to major in mechanical engineering. “The teachers here really helped create a pathway for me and inspired me,” he said.

His father, Raymundo Corona, said he has home-schooled his children until he heard that the school was opening and enrolled his son in the freshman class. “My wife and I went to district schools and we were not comfortable sending our children there,” he said. “The local schools were overcrowded and he would get lost in the crowd. Here, he got personalized teaching and reached a level he never would have. They are strict and wear uniforms, and so they can focus on their work and not trying to be trendy.”

Another student, Pamela Joya, is one of the top five scoring students in the school and reminisced about some of the good and bad over the past four years. Some teachers left, some persevered. “We stayed up late at nights and cried and wanted to give up, but they set the bar high,” Joya said. “And many of us are now the first in our families to even touch a college campus.”

Class president Vanessa Ruiz translated the opening speech into Spanish for the mostly Latino audience. Another student speaker at the graduation ceremony was class valedictorian Juan Castro, who landed a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. He encouraged his fellow students to remember all the firsts in their school: first prom, first senior camp, first graduating class, and their principal, Mide “Mac” Macauley, who provided all of them motivation.

Juan Castro landed a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.

The principal recalled the first hot summer day when school started four years ago for this class and admitted, “It was novelty and confusion for all of us.”

USC President C.L. Max Nikias told the students in his keynote address: “The decisions you make will determine your character, and good judgment is the difference between success and failure.” He called the accomplishments at the high school a “historic graduation day.”

Karen Symms Gallagher, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education and chairwoman of Ednovate’s board, said, “We have all been looking forward to this four years ago since we welcomed the freshman class and it really is the culmination of our initiative in the school of education to improve urban education globally, nationally and locally. It is nice to see them in their hats and robes today.”

She added, “I see this as a model for university school collaboration for LAUSD and other districts throughout the nation.”

For the mother of quadruplets, Childress said she is emotional and ecstatic. “They are quadruplets and did not fit in to a conventional high school and Hybrid was a good fit, it was small, very organized and the best thing for them to flourish.”

One of her daughters, Cambria Kelley, gushed, “One thousand words cannot tell how elated I am to graduate. This is a new chapter for me, I’m opening a new book in my life. As a family we have always bonded and done things together, and this is a new beginning for us all.”

Cambria has a scholarship to UC Riverside. She plans to study creative writing.

*This article has been updated to correct that Oliver Sicat graduated from USC but not from its school of education, and to correct the number of schools Ednovate now operates.