He’s Making The Presidential Grade Student’s Recovery From Domestic Violence Propels Him To National Honors

Two years ago, Derek Lyons abandoned his high-school studies after domestic violence tossed his life into turmoil.

It was an early low point for a promising 16-year-old who saw his family fall apart in a single day when his stepfather threatened his mother and sister with a loaded gun at the family’s home near Seattle.

It was a defining experience as well.

Lyons, who now attends Pullman High School, went on to describe it in many of his nine college applications and the materials for the Presidential Scholar award, the nation’s highest honor for high-school students.

He was accepted at all nine colleges, including Yale and Stanford. This week, while finishing his senior project and choosing where to go to college this fall, he learned he has been named a Presidential Scholar.

“It’s an immense honor,” Lyons said Thursday. “But for me, the biggest satisfaction I think is it’s really the capstone of my high-school courses, the culmination of a lot of goals, and it’s really symbolic of the recovery my family has gone through.”

Lyons will travel next month to Washington, D.C., where he will receive a special medallion along with 140 other scholars chosen from a pool of 2.6 million high-school seniors.

The scholars are selected on the basis of academic achievement as reflected by SAT or ACT scores, essays and school transcripts. Other factors include leadership, character and commitment to high ideals.

President Lyndon B. Johnson created the award in 1964 to acknowledge and honor good scholarship.

“We pay a great deal of attention to athletes and stars,” Education Secretary Richard Riley said in announcing the awards Tuesday, “but rarely notice the personal victories in the classroom.”

Applying for the award, said Lyons, was like completing “three or four college applications.” He was asked to touch on what he does for fun, describe a conversation that had changed his views and tell about his defining life experience.

Lyons said he wrote about a 24-hour period in which his stepfather grew menacing and the teen went from “having a relatively normal life” to “no home, no possessions, no money.”

Lyons, his mother and his sister fled their home because of the threats. With the family in turmoil, Lyons left school a month before his classes ended.

After four months of domestic-violence shelters and living with friends, Lyons resettled with his mother and sister in Pullman.

His mother, Tina, now is remarried and studies speech and hearing at Washington State University. His sister, Brooke, is a freshman at Pullman High.

Lyons, a 4.0 student and National Merit finalist, is a member of the Pullman Future Problem Solving Team, which will go to the internationals next month for the third time in his three years of competition.

Lyons also competes in the school’s Knowledge Bowl and has won the statewide Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest two of the three times he was eligible.

“He’s got a real sensitivity toward people who have been underdogs,” said Gloria Davis Tinder, Pullman High School teacher who helped Lyons with his essays. “So he’s been able to write really wonderful essays about what Martin Luther King would think today or how Martin Luther King would handle things. He’s really sensitive and really perceptive about the plight of others.”

Tinder will accompany Lyons to Washington, D.C., for a distinguished teachers luncheon after Lyons named her as the educator who has had the greatest influence on his academic accomplishments.

Lyons was accepted to Stanford University, Emory University, Rice University, Yale University, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Whitman College and the University of Washington. But he chose Portland’s Reed College, he said, because it has one of the best track records for producing future doctorate recipients. He plans to study biochemistry and political science as an undergraduate, then get a medical degree or go to law school to study public policy.

His personal experience, he said, has helped give him a special perspective on issues such as welfare. Before, he said, he had a “smugly complacent middle-class point of view.”

Now, he said, he realizes hard times “can happen to anybody. And your life can change so drastically in a day that you can’t imagine it until you’ve experienced it.”

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