CUSD students honored for overcoming adversities

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During his freshman year at Clovis High School, Andrew Stokes was determined to leave special education classes.

The hard-of-hearing student picked his grades up and proved to administrators that he didn't need any extra help.

Now in his junior year of high school, Andrew is a talented, computer-savvy student at the Center for Advanced Research and Technology. He is one of 15 Clovis Unified students who recently won $3,000 college scholarships from the Foundation for Clovis Schools, a nonprofit fundraising arm of Clovis Unified.

Every year, the foundation selects about three students from every Clovis Unified high school -- including Gateway, the alternative-education high school -- to receive the Students of Promise scholarship. They are high school juniors who show responsibility and hard work at school despite difficult obstacles.

"These are kids who have gone through horrendous things, but still come to school every day," said Linda Holmes, Clovis Unified's administrator of resource development. "They've taken care of business, and you'd never know what they've gone through."

Usually the scholarship is $1,500, but this year students were awarded twice as much because of an ongoing donation from foundation member J.P. Sethi.

In two years the scholarship will expand to include the first class of juniors at Clovis North High School, which only has freshman students this year. The high school, on Willow and International avenues, opened last fall.

"I wasn't expecting to win any award whatsoever," Andrew said about the scholarship. "It came out of the blue."

At CART, Andrew takes advanced computer-networking classes along with his regular education classes such as English. The hands-on, laboratory-based high school is a joint venture between Clovis and Fresno unified school districts. Students spend half of the day at their home high school -- Clovis High for Andrew -- and the other half at CART.

Andrew also has a part-time job designing Web sites and plans to start a technology-based company when he graduates from college.

"Even in junior high, he was really skilled in computers," said Bill Rotella, Clovis Unified's deaf and hard-of-hearing specialist. "He was doing things you wouldn't think of kids at his age doing."

Rotella nominated Andrew for the scholarship. The high school junior has come a long way from when he was in elementary school, with behavioral problems and poor grades, Rotella said.

"There was a lot of labeling. They labeled him as different and he overcame that," Rotella said. "He was determined to be on his own and show that he could do it without any help."

Jillian Garretson, a junior at Gateway High School, also won a scholarship.

For 16-year-old Jillian, getting a driver's license means she will drive all of her younger brothers and sisters to school. Jillian has become a third parent to her seven younger siblings after her father became sick with lupus, a debilitating autoimmune disease. After her mother leaves for work in the morning, Jillian gets her siblings ready for school and feeds her father.

She missed so many days of school during her freshman year, the normally A student was sent to Gateway.

"I have to help out at home and do the family duties you have to do when there's a piece missing," Jillian said.

The scholarship solidified her plans to attend college after high school.

"I was really excited about it because I was on the line of trying to decide if I was going to college or not," she said. "Getting the scholarship was the thing I needed to be like, 'Yeah, I definitely want to go to college.' "

The other scholarship recipients are:

Michelle Chadbourne, Tyler Maxwell and Katie Pretzer from Buchanan High School;

Jireh Somera, Ge Thao and Brittany Wilkinson from Clovis East High School;

Dustin Barbo and Matthew Eskender from Clovis High;

Chelsea Rzonca, Conner Wells and Andrew Zucker from Clovis West High School; and

Davis Mendez and Steven Thao from Gateway.