Overcoming the odds

Friday was the end of the semester for all Spokane Public Schools students, but for 18-year-old Kalyn Kyle it was graduation day.

It was an accomplishment that a year ago seemed very unlikely for the Rogers High School senior.

About that time, a guy introduced Kyle to a drug she had never tried before – methamphetamine.

She started smoking marijuana when she was 12 and first tried cocaine when she was 14. But meth was different. She quickly became addicted and entrenched in a world that revolved around her next fix.

“It became more important than anything else,” Kyle said. “I knew I was behind in school, but I guess I really didn’t care.”

Instead of preparing for high school graduation with the class of 2006, Kyle checked into rehab. She spent 90 days in inpatient treatment, and when she returned to school she was four full credits behind.

“My dream was always to walk across that stage – to feel that sense of achievement,” Kyle said. “I want to be able to go to college and become somebody myself.”

Unwilling to give up her dream despite seemingly insurmountable odds, Kyle is one of three “super seniors” at Rogers who returned for a fifth year.

Instead of enrolling at an alternative school or completing her general equivalency degree, Kyle wanted a diploma from her home school.

She comes from a family of John R. Rogers Pirates – the school’s mascot – and didn’t want a diploma from anywhere else. Her sister graduated from Rogers in 2001. Her mother attended but never graduated.

“Not a lot of kids actually have the guts to come back,” her mother, Shelley Kyle, said. “I’m real proud.”

It’s rare for fifth-year seniors to make it through the full semester in the regular high school setting. They usually drop out or seek other options because coming back is so hard.

Many are working, supporting families, or are parents themselves. Of the three fifth-year seniors at Rogers, one has dropped out and one is not passing all of his classes and will have to take another semester, though school officials concede that is unlikely.

“All their friends have moved on, and mentally so have they,” said Barb Farnsworth, an intervention specialist at Rogers who works with troubled teens. “It’s like they are stuck in this other world, in the middle waiting for their life to begin.”

There are other programs that try to engage students who have fallen behind. Spokane’s Havermale High School graduates about 100 students a year, of which one-third are fifth-year students, said Havermale Principal Fred Schrumpf.

“It’s normal around here,” Schrumpf said. “We basically tell kids ‘That’s fine, you can be here a fifth year.’ We encourage it; we support it,” because dropping out is not a good alternative.

They are behind for a variety of circumstances. Some had a baby, a bad ninth-grade year, were homeless or moved around a lot.

Kyle, who turns 19 on Sunday, said her goal was to graduate when she was 18.

Now she’s playing catch-up on many things. Commencement for the class of 2007 is not until June, when she actually gets her diploma.

In the meantime, she is looking forward to finally getting a driver’s license – you can’t take a driver’s test when you are high on drugs, she said – and she wants to go to college. She’ll probably enroll in community college for now. She’s unsure what she will study, but someday she’d like to go to the University of Montana to study zoology.

Since rehab, Kyle met her new, much-older boyfriend through Myspace.com. He provided shelter for Kyle and her mother. He has also encouraged her to go to school many days over the past semester when she wanted to skip.

There’s a calendar inside Farnsworth’s classroom that reads “Kalyn’s countdown to graduation.” The days she attended class are filled in with a black marker. There are a few days colored in red or green for days she skipped or was sick.

Some of her teeth are rotten and abscessed, partly from the meth. Without medical insurance they went untreated, until the school stepped in and helped her get some assistance from the state. Some days the pain of an infected tooth would keep her home. But most days, she showed up, ready to learn and finish what she started.

When other students would complain about doing their work or coming to school, she would just look at them and say, “Get over it. Just do it.”

“I think she’s finally getting it,” Farnsworth said. “She’s saying, ‘This is my life, and I’m going to live it. I’m not going to worry about anybody else.’ “