Lucy Gellman Photo
Jeanette Morales at Adult Basic Ed graduation.
Jeanette Morales never thought she’d get to have a high school graduation. Until a late lesson on Galileo Galilei encouraged her to keep going, and become an educator herself.
Thursday night Morales was one of 99 students to receive her high school diploma through the New Haven Adult and Continuing Education Center, which celebrated its graduates in a degree ceremony at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU).
The class’s 99 diploma recipients, 19 external diploma program students, and 44 GED recipients are headed on to programs that include Gateway and Housatonic community colleges, the U.S. Air Force, Marines, and Navy, ConnCAT, Southern Connecticut State University, Central Connecticut State University, University of Connecticut and the Yale School of Music among others.
As members of the class of 2017 walked across SCSU’s Lyman Auditorium stage to cheers, several of them reached back into their own histories and told the stories of what had brought them to that moment.
The class of 2017.
Like Morales, a 33-year-old mother of two. Eighteen years ago, an unexpected pregnancy pulled her out of high school at 15; a second one made it almost impossible to consider heading back to school. From Norwalk, she moved to Bridgeport with her mom, and then New Haven. In the city with young kids and almost no support network, she found herself working multiple jobs at chain restaurants, trekking from her home downtown and back multiple times a day.
“I was doing the best I could, and parenting my babies,” she said, smoothing out the silky blue edges of her cap and gown as she waited for the ceremony to begin. At some point, she realized that doing the best she could meant finishing her high school diploma. In 2015, when her kids became old enough to watch themselves after school, she enrolled for classes.
Graduates receive their diplomas.
It was harder than she imagined, she said. She would start the day by sending her kids off to school, then take classes from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. At 2:30, she’d head off for the afternoon shift at work downtown, staying on her feet until 11 at night. When she got home “to see my babies asleep,” it was homework time — hours for assignments that often lasted until two or three in the morning.
“Now, we are here, and the journey has just begun,” she said during the ceremony, addressing her peers from the stage. “That’s part of taking risks. That’s what lives are all about. There are times that I would cry in the school bathroom or at work because all I could think of was my bed.”
But she powered through. After research on the astronomer Galileo Galilei got her hooked on history (“He was such a rebellious man!” she exclaimed just before graduating), she realized that her high school diploma alone wasn’t going to cut it — because she wanted to be a history teacher. She spoke with first-year Adult Ed Principal Fallon Daniels about enrolling at Gateway Community College for an associate’s degree in Education, which could lead her to a BA at SCSU. Daniels encouraged her to do it, and then made an offer: If Morales stays at Gateway, she can do her teacher training back at Adult Ed.
Gerardo Pedro Rayas: from English to Engineering.
Gerardo Pedro Rayas, also 33, was graduating Thursday as a new step in an evolving American story. After immigrating to the U.S. from León, a city in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, 17 years ago, he spent his teenage years bouncing between odd jobs — house painting, landscaping, and waiting tables in New Haven and Hamden.
Working almost constantly, he hadn’t thought of going back for his high school diploma. Then two years ago, he heard about Adult Ed from a tutor at Bridges ESL, a small nonprofit that holds English classes at Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center on Crown Street. A few months later, he decided to enroll.
“Once I started going, I started seeing that it is very important to continue my education, and study, and study,” he said. While he discovered a new love for language arts, he sees his next step as engineering, so he can work on heating and plumbing. He also wants to continue English lessons, which he said may be easier “now that I have friends from different neighborhoods in New Haven.”
Amoudia Mohamed and a friend.
Taking photos with her mom a few yards away was Amoudia Mohamed, a recent immigrant who had put her education temporarily on hold when she received her visa three years ago, and left West Africa for the U.S. with her parents. In 2014, she arrived in New Haven from Togo, where she had just completed high school and was about to receive her diploma.
In early 2016, Mohamed enrolled in GED and English classes, “which took time because English is my second language,” she said (French is her first). English, then social studies, caught her interest — but it was the familiar language of numbers and equations in her science classes that ultimately called to her. Determined to finish, she attended Monday through Thursday, and working part-time in the evenings. Now that she’s completed GED classes, she’s planning on pursuing biomedical engineering at Gateway Community College, and transferring to a four-year college that will leave her prepared for a job in medicine.
“I Approve Of Myself”
Moore’s cap.
As students around her fussed over their gowns and posed for photos, Cassandra Moore checked the final touches on her embellished mortarboard, and made double sure that her 3‑year-old daughter Emerie had gotten to her seat. The whole ceremony was for her, Moore said.
She lowered her cap to show it off as she traced the road that had gotten her to graduation. In one corner of the cap was a picture of Emerie, bordered by the words “Delayed, But Not Denied.” In another, an old photograph of Moore’s grandmother, who died last April. Both of them keep her going, Moore said. She was twenty and not a high school graduate when she became pregnant with Emerie, and has been raising her as a single mom. While earning her diploma at Adult Ed, she worked part time, trying to hold her household together.
Moore receives her diploma.
Now, “I’m trying to set a better example for my daughter,” she said. In the fall, she plans to go to trade school in New Haven, she added.
As she and 161 of her peers filed into the auditorium to “Pomp and Circumstance” and a routine from the Governor’s Foot Guard of Connecticut, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp had a message that echoed Moore’s raison d’être: It’s never too late to finish an education.
“I want you to say something I say to myself every day,” she said. “I want you to say it hundreds of times a day. Say: I approve of myself.”
“I approve of myself!” 162 students bellowed back.
For Hungry Students, A New Fix
Newton and her daughter Rev. Katrina Jones in the Pantry.
Months before June’s celebration, Daniels worried about a potential roadblock between students and graduation — food insecurity, the lack of reliable access to food on a monthly basis. Hundreds of students arrived hungry, and remained hungry during their classes. Daniels observed that several who did bring food ate salt-packed Cup O’ Noodles or instant macaroni and cheese. At a conference in Hartford, fellow adult educators mentioned small food pantries that they were setting up to remedy a growing need at their institutions.
“We know that if basic needs are not met, it’ll make it difficult for students to learn,” she said on Wednesday at the Adult Ed Center’s headquarters on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard . “It struck me — we gotta to find a way to take care of this community. I said team: We’ve gotta get the funds.”
Food insecurity is close to Daniels’s heart — she started volunteering at soup kitchens in middle school, and then joined groups like the Midnight Run for the homeless in high school. In college, it shaped her choice to become an educator instead of a doctor, because “I felt that I could help everyone I wanted to.”
Daniels at her desk.
In October, she applied for grants, ultimately bringing in $13,000 from the United Way and Community Foundation of Greater New Haven. Partnering with adult ed administrator (and former alder) Gwen Newton, she began to build a snack pantry, stocked with granola bars, raisins, fresh fruit, and juices. Newton is adding protein-packed yogurt in time for the summer session, which begins in July. It’s not as much as they’d like to be doing, Daniels said, but it’s a start.
“The importance of those meals at home, tracking who gets the food, and how it impacts relationships” is huge, Daniels said. Each time she hears a story about a student who is grateful for extra food (Newton mentioned one who prays with her over the snacks, which she said she finds particularly moving).
Back at graduation, she looked out at several students who had used the pantry in the months leading up to graduation, and grinned broadly. Then she issued some parting advice from one of her most formative influences: Winnie the Pooh.
“Always remember, you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
To listen to an episode of WNHH’ “Kitchen Sync” program about the new food pantry and graduation, click on or download the audio above.