Manual to success

Angered by the closure of her inner-city high school, Julissa Torrez persevered

Nancy Mitchell, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 26, 2007 at midnight

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Julissa Torrez could write a book about fighting back, about overcoming the odds, about any of the many clichés often thrown at poor kids growing up in the neglected neighborhoods of north Denver.

She has, in fact, scrawled her personal motto in black marker on the back of her binder of poetry. It says, in part:

My community

has set me up for failure but i choose to believe otherwise

Because Julissa is, after all, only 17, she ends her declaration of independence with a bubbled-in black heart.

More than a year ago, this Hispanic girl who once lived in motels along Colfax Avenue stood up to the white Yale Law School graduate who runs Denver Public Schools and rapped that he was treating her and her Manual High School classmates like "animals."

That anger didn't stop the Denver school board from closing the school for a year, but it did help make Julissa the temporary darling of the local and national media.

And that, in turn, helped her win financial aid to the University of Colorado and gain the attention of Mayor John Hickenlooper, who danced with her at last month's annual DPS gala and who has promised to help get her book of poems published.

"Oh, good, a success story," one DPS official said when told an article about Julissa was planned.

Julissa, though, would disagree. If hers is one of the happier stories to emerge from the bungled closure of Manual, it is not without its painful moments.

One was on a recent Friday morning, when the seniors of Thomas Jefferson High School gathered downtown for graduation rehearsal.

Julissa, who transferred to TJ after Manual was shut down, sat in a front row, head down, nearly engulfed in her gray hooded sweat shirt.

She looked sleepy and, despite the antics of the giddy, soon-to-be graduates around her, some of whom have been together since grade school, she talked to no one and no one talked to her.

"I felt horrible being there today, like a big outsider," Julissa said later. "It's like being a foster child and going into someone else's house - like trying to get into a family photo and it didn't work out."

From happy to sad

Manual's closure in 2006-07 displaced 558 students, virtually all of them minority and poor.

The school at East 28th Avenue and Franklin Street served some of the city's toughest neighborhoods and was largely failing at that - only seven of the 219 sophomores who took the state math test in 2006 were performing at grade level.

Still, for Julissa and many of her friends, Manual was home. It was small enough that their teachers knew them, and they all knew one another. Few kids from outside the neighborhood went into the school.

"I was happy when I got up in the morning because I got to go to Manual," said Ricky Escobedo, 17, who now rides a bus to South High School. "I was sad when the day was over because I had to leave."

Of the 558 students, 131 were seniors, and 107 of those are graduating from DPS high schools this spring, including Julissa and five others from TJ in southeast Denver.

The remaining 24 seniors have either moved out of DPS or have insufficient credits to graduate. Ten have dropped out, according to figures provided by DPS.

Altogether, 18 percent - or 102 - of the 558 former Manual students have withdrawn or dropped out of school as of this week. Ten more students couldn't be located.

Even at TJ, where Principal Sandra Just and her staff worked to welcome 30 former Manual students, the transition was too much for some. One teacher estimated as many as half those transfers have left the school.

Ricky, a top student who was teased for being a "nerd" at Manual, has struggled in the much bigger academic arena that is South, near Washington Park.

"A lot of us," he said, referring to the former Manual students, "we feel inferior. We feel incompetent."

He counsels one boy who is considering dropping out to "not fit the Manual stereotype, don't be a Manual casualty."

Yet there is success, too. This week, former Manual student Bryan "BJ" Greer was awarded a basketball scholarship to a junior college in Wyoming. He's the first TJ graduate to win a basketball scholarship in at least five years.

"In the end, it was better for me," he said of the switch to TJ.

Julissa has also done well. Always a good student, she needed only a U.S. history class to graduate but picked up pre-law and British literature as well.

And though she wasn't valedictorian - as her older sister, Zerina, had been at Manual a year ago - she and another former Manual student, Simone Williams, got to take the stage at TJ's graduation Thursday and read aloud their poem about the past year:

We felt the reality of the world, the time was cold and long,

but through it all we still remained, 558 strong.

Mother-daughter bond

When Julissa rapped out her anger to DPS Superintendent Michael Bennet, when she joined a student walkout to school district headquarters in the freezing cold, her mother, Cynthia Flores, was right beside her. Literally.

"I was all for it because I want my kids to not be afraid to speak up," Flores said, pausing a moment before adding, "but not be disrespectful."

Flores, 38, is the object of that rare attitude from her teenage daughter - respect.

Mom's is da bomb, Julissa wrote in one poem.

Born with only one hand, the result of prenatal medicine that was later banned by the U.S. government, Flores said she grew up feeling shunned by her own parents, among others.

She dropped out of North High School in the 11th grade to raise her younger siblings after "my mom went her way, my dad went his way." She is the oldest of seven.

Social services and work - "because I have only one hand, that motivated me to do more," she said - kept the family together, and Flores soon started her own.

After Julissa was born, the third of six siblings, Flores and her children lived in motels, paying $250 a week. Julissa was 10 when Flores finally got off the waiting list and into low-income housing near Manual.

The experiences appear not to have embittered either Flores or her kids but to have honed their resolve.

"They seen me struggling, living in and out of motels," Flores said. "They never had to worry about a meal, but it was hard. I just told my kids, I don't want them to struggle like me."

Julissa, who is playing with her baby niece nearby in the family living room, chimes in matter-of-factly:

"We see the environment we're in," she said. "We don't let that bring us down."

Julissa and her siblings clearly see education as their way out. Both older sisters are in college, and Julissa is soon to follow. Her younger siblings - 16, 10 and 8 - are excelling in school.

"I'm the proudest mom," Flores said, "especially to have such a big family and her being the third to graduate. I'm halfway there."

Letting go of anger

Julissa discovered poetry as a freshman, with the help of Manual teacher Michael Palmieri. Write what you see, she was told, write what you know. So she did:

Parents don't go to games

go home being ashamed

food stamps to Medicaid

parents putting their kids in fame

we are all the same

poor, slang, hustlas

we are all each others customers

Boys crept into her poetry, and so have her thoughts about Manual, in the form of her old school's colors - and even Michael Bennet.

Favorite color red favorite color blue/but our childhood ungrew, she wrote in one poem. In another, Like the superintendent in his godly chair wearing the crown/It's not fair my school is down.

Lately, though, Julissa has been letting go of some of her anger about Manual. When she and Williams wrote their poem for TJ's graduation, she balked at making it all about her old school.

"I saw it as TJ's graduation. They worked hard for it," she said. "To me, it just didn't feel right. We made it like half and half - half about Manual, half about future goals."

And Thursday, when she walked across the stage in unfamiliar high heels to get her diploma, that grudge was nowhere in sight. She cried as she hugged family members.

Sad? No. "I'm so happy," she said.

Which does not mean Manual is forgotten. In fact, Julissa plans to stay involved, as she has through the past year, keeping tabs on former students and checking in with those who are coming in to the redesigned school.

About Bennet, she now says, "In a way, I thank him and appreciate him for helping me have new experiences."

But she still believes Manual's students were largely ignored in the district's effort to build a better school.

"They pushed kids to the side," she said. "I want to stay involved, no matter what. If I don't, nobody else is going to care."

She stopped for a minute, then added, "I would have wanted someone else to be there for me."

Ode to a superintendent

Former Manual High School student Julissa Torrez rapped this poem to Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet about the pending closure of her beloved high school. The first line refers to the Denver Plan, Bennet's strategic reform proposal to improve DPS:

What is a Denver Plan?

what about the children's plan

u say it's for the better

but apparently not if I'm writing this letter

u minus well put us in jail

because this plan is setting us up to fail

We are your animals to experiment I guess

and give us problems and long tests

everything's not based on knowledge but common sense

the plan and this man makes no sense

u might be mad because the words i speak is right

but don't trip we will win this fight