Mr. Navarro Says
The soft-spoken 18-year-old boy in a buttoned-down blue oxford cloth shirt tells me that when he was fifteen, he was taken away from his mother and put into a foster care facility. Up until then, Ramon* been hanging around with tough kids, doing drugs and feeling like he had no future; suddenly, he was at a new school, Cesar Chavez Social Justice Academy in San Fernando, where he found himself alone, far from his friends. In the evenings after school, he’d go for long walks by himself, thinking about what would happen to him. Having seen his mother spiral out of control on drugs, he knew that he couldn’t continue the life he’d been living without ending up an addict. But what could he choose? What other future was there?
“Mr. Navarro says that if you aim at nothing, that’s exactly what you’ll achieve,” Ramon tells me. Mr. Navarro is the principal of his school, the person he says inspired him to change his life. With a transcript full of terrible grades from his previous school and his old life, Ramon has faced an exhausting battle to get himself back on track. “Mr. Navarro says ‘this, too, shall pass,’” Ramon says, a statement that he repeats to himself when times get hard, reminding himself that Mr. Navarro has told him of his own similar struggles. Now, Ramon is a mentor to other kids, telling them his story and encouraging them not to give up. He will graduate in June and plans to attend community college.
He is the fifth student I’ve met in the last two hours who has told me that Mr. Navarro changed his life.
I’m at Cesar Chavez Social Justice Academy because I volunteered to be part of their