Puerto Rican student gets her hard-earned diploma
Anenushka Piñero didn’t want to leave her family and friends or give up on the small school, with its emphasis on the arts, that she’d attended for more than six years. But after Hurricane Maria smashed into Puerto Rico, staying on the island seemed risky given the uncertainty about when schools would reopen.
“I was scared about my senior year. I didn’t want to lose it,” the 17-year-old said. “I closed my eyes and said, ‘Mom, send me to Florida.’ ”
Anenushka flew to Florida in mid-October — about a month after the storm hit — and moved in with family friends from Puerto Rico who’d previously relocated to the Four Corners area of Osceola County.
She enrolled at Celebration High School, becoming one of nearly 12,000 students from the island who registered in Florida public schools in the wake of the hurricane. Orange and Osceola counties were the top destinations for those students, with their public schools taking in more than 5,000 of them, state figures show.
Anenushka found that Celebration High welcomed her, but everything in the beginning was still so different and so hard.
She missed her family, friends and boyfriend in Puerto Rico. Her new school’s size — more than 2,600 students on a sprawling campus — was overwhelming. Even tougher was the sudden challenge of managing all her classes in English. “My English was so bad,” she said.
And she soon realized that the bewildering alphabet soup of tests everyone kept talking about — ACT, FSA, PERT, SAT — would need to be waded through for her to earn a Florida high school diploma.
“Always, I was a good student,” she said. “I came here, and I couldn’t do what I wanted.”
Her grade-point average in Puerto Rico was a 3.9, meaning she’d earned nearly straight A’s, she said. Here, she worried if she could graduate on time: “I called my mom many times crying.”
Florida requires high school students to pass two exams to earn a diploma — an algebra 1 end-of-course exam and a language arts test, both part of the Florida Standards Assessments, or FSA. Many students complete those exams by 10th grade.
Students also can use scores from the Post Secondary Readiness Test, or PERT, and from the ACT or SAT, the college admission exams, to meet those graduation requirements. Typically, those alternative tests are what students who arrive in Florida well into their high school careers use to get a diploma.
Anenushka passed the PERT with no problem, meeting Florida’s math requirement. But on her first attempt at the SAT, she didn’t get the needed language arts score.
After the hurricane, the Florida Department of Education worked out an agreement with its counterpart in Puerto Rico so that Puerto Rican 11th and 12th graders who enrolled in Florida schools could graduate with an island diploma. That would make it easier for teenagers who didn’t have the English skills to pass Florida’s tests and likely didn’t have the time to learn them.
Anenushka knew that was an option, but it wasn’t one she wanted. She was in Florida, and she wanted a Florida diploma, she said during an interview where she spoke mostly in English but fell back on Spanish to explain complicated or nuanced things.
After her first SAT failure, she signed up to take the test again in March. Then she continued to work hard in her English class, which was for teenagers still learning the language.
Early on, Anenushka was very quiet, said Angela Quispe, her English teacher. But then things changed. “She got more comfortable. She participated in class and let out her brilliance,” Quispe said. “Everybody realized how smart she was.”
As months passed, other just-arrived students from Puerto Rico entered the room, too, and Anenushka helped them navigate their new school. “She was a support system for them.”
Although Anenushka worried about her next attempt at the SAT, Quispe was confident her pupil would pass, earning a diploma and clearing her path to college.
By the time of the second test, Anenushka’s mother, father and younger brother had joined her in Florida, all of them now sharing the family friend’s house.
The day the SAT scores were released, she knew she could look up her results on her phone. But initially, she was too nervous. Finally, sitting in the living room, with one hand partially shielding her eyes from what she feared was more bad news, she glanced at the new set of numbers.
“Mom,” she shouted, “I did it!”
Her mother, Sadelka Collazo, speaking in Spanish, said she never doubted her daughter would succeed and despite the “very difficult” times, has no regrets about the decision the storm forced on her family. “I knew that she would be able to pass the exam,” she said. “I’m very proud.”
On Thursday, Anenushka joined other Celebration High graduates dressed in purple caps and gowns and received her Florida diploma.
It was a day of mixed emotions, she said. She was excited but also wistful that she wasn’t graduating with the tight-knit group of 65 that makes up the senior class in her Puerto Rican school in Bayamón.
She was sorry that her grandparents and other extended family still in Puerto Rico wouldn’t be able to attend, but she enjoyed celebrating with the family, friends and teachers who were be at the ceremony at Kissimmee’s Silver Spurs Arena.
Anenushka has a new job at a fast-food restaurant and plans to go to college, although she has not yet settled on a school.
She hopes for a career in a medical field. She and her family are set on staying in Florida.
“Watch her,” Quispe said. “She’s going to go far.”
Anenushka said that her unexpectedly challenging senior year has given her lessons on perseverance and perspective that she expects will stick with her.
“Sometimes when you make a decision, you need to think more in the future,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how difficult it will be in the moment.”