Student on His Own Proves the Power of 1

Jaime Flores has an A-minus average in high school but doesn’t have a bed to sleep in. It’s hard to afford a bed when you live on your own, pay your way with a restaurant job and have no family around to support you through your education.

But Jaime, 18, has something else: a full support system of adults, because teachers at Estancia High School in Costa Mesa have embraced the exceptional student with the neat clothes and bright smile, taking him on outings, serving as a sympathetic ear, digging into their own pockets to buy him necessities.

And now he is accepted as a member of their families for the holidays.

In fact, he’s had more invitations than he can possibly accept.

He will spend Christmas with Maria Garcia, his counselor, much to the dismay of Monica McCrae-Steele, his Spanish teacher, who issued her invitation just a little too late. McCrae-Steele is making up for that by getting him a desk and chair for Christmas.

It was the same with Thanksgiving, when six teachers were ready to welcome Jaime into their homes.

Garcia invited Jaime to accompany her and her husband to her parents’ house this Christmas for a large family party because she loves the boy’s shy, sweet company, the attentive way he listens and then offers an anecdote from his own life to show he understands and cares about what she’s saying. She admires how hard he works, always coming to see her to make sure he’s on track for college.

But there’s another reason too: Kids such as Jaime, kids who are determined to persevere, are why she went into education. And she and his other teachers will do anything to see he makes it.

“I love him like my son,” McCrae-Steele said. “I’ve never encountered a kid exactly like him. He’s very balanced. He’s very focused. And he’s very polite.”

The teacher also finds herself worrying about him. Does he get enough to eat? Who takes care of him when he’s sick? How does he find the energy to get up every morning and go to school, when he’s working more than 20 hours a week?

Estancia, like many high schools around Southern California, has other students in similar situations. Some of these teenagers have come on their own from Mexico, El Salvador or Guatemala, leaving behind everything they know for a chance at a better-paying job or an education. They tackle full loads of courses and support themselves and often their families at home. Yet, the teachers often don’t know just how independent--and how alone--these child-adults are. Many students refuse to discuss it.

But when these youngsters do open up to teachers, they find parental figures who, despite their own modest salaries and life demands, give extra time, feeling and personal funds.

Jaime “represents a whole group of kids . . . who are working their tails off and staying on their own,” said retired English teacher Shirley Feller, who takes her former students to doctors’ appointments, finds them furniture and even, on occasion, drives them to the airport and sends them home when they just can’t handle it anymore.

“It just amazes me,” she said.

Before she retired last year, Feller used to announce to all the students in her basic English class that they were invited to her house for Thanksgiving. This year, she still had a few students--including Jaime--visit.

Jaime came to Costa Mesa 2 1/2 years ago from Tlaxcala, Mexico, near Mexico City, after the death of his little brother and the subsequent breakup of his family. Still shy of 16, he had been invited to stay with relatives in the area while he tried to earn the money to set up a window-repair business back home.

But an aunt suggested that he might like to go to school when he wasn’t working as a dishwasher in restaurants and helped him register.

To his surprise, Jaime, a lackluster student who attended school only sporadically in Mexico, loved Estancia.

“I never thought I would be a student in the United States,” he said, slipping books into his ultra-organized locker and nodding and chatting to friends in Spanish. “I didn’t think I would like school.”

But soon after arriving, Jaime had a falling out with his relatives, compelling him to strike out on his own. He stayed in a succession of shared rooms until he landed in his present home, half a small bedroom in another family’s apartment. He found jobs by standing outside restaurants and asking bilingual passersby if they would go inside for him and inquire whether there were any openings. And after paying for his food, board and clothing, he still made sure there was money left to send to his mother and siblings in Mexico.

The apartment where he rents space is cheerfully decorated, with a Christmas tree twinkling in the front room, but Jaime and his roommate, another boy from Mexico who recently dropped out of Estancia, don’t feel comfortable hanging out in the family’s space.

Instead, Jaime sits on the floor of his room to study or goes to his best friend’s place.

During the past two years, the pair have created a surrogate family because both carry burdens and memories the other can understand. Although they met at Estancia, the two juniors who both live on their own are from the same town in Mexico. Both work in restaurants. And, despite the obstacles they face, both are determined to do well in school.

Classes this year have been harder, and sometimes Jaime feels overwhelmed. A junior, he is taking biology, U.S. history and geometry, all courses in which he must compete against students who were born and raised speaking English.

The two boys help each other with homework: One is better at geometry; the other at English. Sometimes, they get burgers, then sit on a bench in Triangle Square, looking out at the sprawl of Costa Mesa and marveling at the incredible wealth of Newport Beach, the beauty of the ocean beyond and the possibilities and hardships of their new lives.

Jaime has created a community for himself in his neighborhood on the Westside of Costa Mesa. On one corner is the Chinese restaurant, where he has learned to like barbecued beef and gotten to know the proprietors so well they’ll give him credit. Across the street is the Mexican restaurant where he sometimes eats, and where the manager, also an immigrant from Mexico, always has a kind word. Jaime also attends church in Costa Mesa.

But his teachers at Estancia have been his refuge.

He loved Feller’s English class, in which she helped him learn the quirks of grammar and gave him advice on everything from work to family to where to live. He loved being able to help other students who arrived after he did. He admired his teachers, who, from the first, seemed to go out of their way to help him.

But most of all, he fell in love with the idea that he could achieve the previously unthinkable: finish high school and go to college.

His ambition of starting a window-repair business has been refined into a dream of becoming an architect or graphic artist.

“I don’t feel smart, but I don’t want to fail myself,” he said. “Now that I’m here, I want to finish here. I want to go to college. No one in my family has ever gone to college before. When I see my grades, I think ‘I can do it.’ ”

In turn, many of Jaime’s teachers found he touched a soft spot in their hearts, each for different reasons.

Garcia, his counselor, sees a little of herself in the quiet boy, who always has a cheerful smile in the halls but sometimes expresses his feelings of loneliness and exhaustion in the privacy of her office.

“I was the first person in my family to finish college,” she said, patting his shoulder and offering him a tissue recently as he talked about how hard it is when he gets sick and doesn’t have his mother to take care of him. Later, she explained that when she was in high school, a counselor saw potential in her and urged her to go on to college, and now she is determined to pass along that gift.

Chris Schilling, who had Jaime for world history last year, was amazed by the boy’s commitment to his studies and by his prowess on a bicycle. Jaime often returns to his former teacher’s classroom for guidance on how to do research projects or understand the intricacies of American history.

Schilling was also impressed by the joyful ferocity Jaime exhibited on his bicycle.

When he heard that Jaime used to ride his bike up mountains at home in Mexico, Schilling, an amateur cyclist, invited him for a ride in Cleveland National Forest. For once, Jaime knew how to do something better than his teacher, chugging past him on the way up and flying down the hills.

“I’ve never felt so old,” Schilling said. “But it was fun.”

McCrae-Steele, who has Jaime for Spanish, said he first caught her attention when he came to her and asked her to correct something he had written in Spanish. Because he did not attend school regularly in Mexico, Jaime also struggled with writing fluently in Spanish.

“This was extra work that no one was asking him to do,” she said. “It was phenomenal.”

To thank her, Jaime bought McCrae-Steele a bouquet of flowers on the last day of school.

“It broke my heart,” she said. “He doesn’t have money to spend on that.”

But it is art teacher Christine Murray who gave Jaime one of the best gifts: a watercolor he had painted was chosen to decorate mouse pads all over the school.

When he’s not studying or working, Jaime loves to draw and paint.

“He just has a gift for color and design,” Murray said.

Because of scheduling complications, Jaime couldn’t take Murray’s art class this year, but he still comes to her for assignments.

“I feel so lucky, because my teachers always end up helping me,” Jaime said. “When I feel depressed or sick or have a problem, they are always there. I feel proud of this school.”