Accepting the Challenge : A Young Man Tells How He Stayed on Track and Steered Clear of Gangs

SANTA ANA — On paper, Jose Cecilio Sanchez doesn’t have the sort of family profile that fills teachers with optimism. Hailing from an immigrant single-parent family of 13 children, Sanchez knew no economic luxury. In another young man’s life, such disadvantages could have proven insurmountable.

But in Sanchez’s, they produced a young man on the cusp of triumph. On June 16, Sanchez will graduate from Santa Ana’s Valley High School with a 3.2 grade-point average, bound for Cal State Fullerton in the fall. A dedicated track team member, he has also worked nights and weekends since he was 13 to help pay for his clothes.

In a time when teachers are battling drugs, gangs and hard economic times just to keep children in school, and when administrators are defending their programs against repeated budget cuts, a story such as Sanchez’s amounts to a piercing victory cry, a living, breathing demonstration that a hard-working student can succeed, even against the odds.

It is all the more inspiring coming from the county’s largest school district, Santa Ana Unified, where funding problems make it tougher every year to provide a quality eduction for a heavily low-income and Spanish-speaking student body.

At Valley High, where just 15% of the students go on to four-year colleges, Sanchez has become something of a poster child, a model of a boy who managed to resist all the bad influences that can undermine a good mind. Teachers wish they could clone him, or at least infect other teens with his example.

“He is such a nice young man. I wish we could bottle it, whatever it is that he’s got,” said English teacher Rebecca Aten, who taught Sanchez two years ago. “I wish we could find the clue to what makes these kids stay out of gangs like he did.

“He’s polite and attentive in class, and he wants to be a winner, not a marginal kid. The bottom line is he’s very determined.”

Asked to talk about himself, the modest, soft-spoken 18-year-old chuckles and shifts uneasily in his chair. Sanchez, who came here from Mexico at age 4 and learned English in kindergarten, credits his family, friends and advisers on the track team for helping to feed his ambition to go to college.

“If it hadn’t been for cross-country, I would have been on the streets, the way the neighborhoods are here,” the Santa Ana resident said. “If you’re not into sports and education, you’re probably going to be out with your friends.”

In junior high at Spurgeon Intermediate School in Santa Ana, Sanchez pulled down Bs and Cs. He held a newspaper route and assisted his brother in plumbing work but never thought much about his future, he said.

Then in high school, at the urging of sisters and brothers, he joined the track team and found a new circle of friends dedicated to sports and academics. He also found a mentor in track coach George Payan Jr., the sort of man who would solicit donations from local businesses so less fortunate team members could afford hotels during out-of-town meets.

“All I did for Sanchez was set challenges, and he accepted them,” Payan said. “We set personal goals, academic goals, athletic goals, and he met them all.

“A lot of kids have too many distractions, so they aren’t consistent. He overcame the distractions. Like the gangs--he could be part of that if he wanted to. He never got involved with drinking or drugs. It would be easy for anyone to get involved with that. But he’s very goal-oriented, and he knew his goals.”

Track began to occupy a lot of Sanchez’s time. Juggling a course load of word processing, government, Algebra II, ceramics and advanced-placement English, he has track practice every day, running cross-country or the one- or two-mile runs, depending on the season.

Sanchez still manages to carve out 20 hours a week to work in the kitchen of a Fountain Valley restaurant and squeezes his homework in while still in class.

His 63-year-old mother, Josefina Sanchez, received no education as a child growing up in Jalisco, Mexico, because she had to work to support her nine siblings. She did not learn to write until she was 15, when an aunt taught her how to pen her name.

Her husband worked in the cornfields, but Sanchez said she brought her brood to the United States when she could no longer tolerate his drinking and physical abuse.

Sanchez said she always taught her kids to study so they could support themselves, since they received no money from their father. But she says she can’t accept much credit for his son’s success.

“His older brothers, that’s the way they are too, they work hard,” Sanchez said in Spanish. “He wants to be like his older brothers. I believe that God gave him the strength, that’s why he keeps going.”

His mother, Sanchez said with a smile, “didn’t know what education meant, but she was happy for us to stay in school and out of trouble.”

Sanchez is the second-youngest of eight boys and five girls. Most are married. Some work as homemakers, others as plumbers, trash-truck drivers or factory workers. Two older sisters are at Rancho Santiago Community College in Santa Ana, studying to become teachers. One older brother, also a Rancho Santiago alumnus, is in the Army in Korea. Another drives a bus in Mexico, hoping to resume his studies to be an accountant.

His siblings encouraged him to go to college. But there always seemed to be difficulties of some sort year to year: Sanchez required two surgeries when he was a child to help weak muscles in his right eye, and even now the eye still wanders, and will need a third operation.

When a brief reunion between his parents ended, his mother found herself unable to pay the rent and had to dispatch her younger children to live with older siblings. Sanchez and a sister lived with a brother, but the younger couple’s marital troubles ended that arrangement after four years, and Sanchez returned to live with his mother.

But these days, Sanchez isn’t thinking about the past so much. He’s looking ahead to college life, where he will pay his tuition with financial aid and money saved from summer jobs. He hopes to emulate his mentor and become a teacher and track coach. He speaks of the future with characteristic understatement.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wanted to go to college. I’m happy about it.”