Truant kids graduate from a special high school

Karina Vazquez from Corona got pregnant four years ago - she was 16 and in high school. For a while she juggled motherhood with classes, but it didn’t work out. Although she dropped out of school, she did not abandon her dream to be the first one in her family with a high school diploma.
On Thursday, June 26, her dream came true. Along with 15 other students, 20-year-old Vazquez received her diploma at the first graduation of North Queens Community High School, a transfer institution for people who have dropped out of high school or have been truant. Situated on 141-25 77th Road in Flushing, this is the only such school in Queens.
“They [the students] have made the difficult decision to change their path,” said principal Winston McCarthy at the beginning of a ceremony that ended in bittersweet tears.
Ulises Guzman, who counsels students at the school, said that “they need somebody to listen to them and to support them.”
That’s why these truant kids are more likely to graduate if they go to a school like this because it gives more personal attention - each student has a counselor and attends small classes, explained McCarthy.
Counselors help students with personal and academic matters and make sure they show up every morning, said McCarthy, who goes by his first name Winston among students because of the school’s philosophy that everybody in the school is equal. “If a kid is absent for three days in a row, the counselor goes to their home,” McCarthy added.
The attendance rate this academic year was 70 percent, he said. “Attendance is always a challenge. [But] it’s much better for them than it was in their old school,” McCarthy explained.
The school’s 124 students, between the ages of 16 and 21, come from big local high schools, he said. A few of the graduates will go to college, he added.
The school is funded by the Department of Education and SCO (formerly St. Christopher-Ottilie) Family of Services, a not-for-profit city agency providing numerous services such as placement for foster care children and temporary housing for homeless families.
The city has four other transfer schools of the same type - three in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx, said Robert McMahon, executive director of SCO Family of Services.
In these transfer schools, 91 percent of the students belong to minorities and 75 percent receive free or reduced-priced lunches, according to Good Shepherd Services, the Wisconsin organization for social and medical aid which designed this transfer school model.