Houston’s foster teens celebrate with graduation photo shoots.
Officials scramble to help make their senior year special
Emily Villagomez turned briefly to the left, tilted her head up and smiled, revealing a dimple in her right cheek. Her black graduation cap sat jauntily in her curly brown hair, golden tassel swinging with every turn asked of her by a photographer.
For a brief moment Sunday in Midtown’s Baldwin Park, her senior photo shoot almost felt normal.
Nothing has been the same for the Spring Woods High School student, who is supposed to graduate Thursday in a socially distant outdoor ceremony at the football stadium. Her last semester of high school has been done virtually using an online classroom software, even as she continues to pull shifts at Pappasito’s Cantina.
Graduation is a rite of passage for American teenagers, and for the class of 2020, one of the most important occasions of their lives has been marred by a global pandemic.
“It’s all just really weird,” Villagomez said, as she finished taking her pictures underneath a canopy of live oak trees. “I’m not that excited, like it hasn’t hit me yet.”
She was one of a dozen teens in state protective custody taking their pictures Sunday morning in the park at a photo shoot organized by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and its Preparation for Adult Living (PAL) Program.
Twins Darius and Jarvis Lewis fidgeted in their matching forest green Hightower High School gowns and “Class of 2020” T-shirts. Like Villagomez, the Lewises had spent the rest of their senior year doing classes online and working
at McDonald’s.
In August, they’re both off to two-year colleges: Darius to Blinn College in Brenham to study electrical engineering and hopefully play football, and Jarvis to Texas State Technical College in Waco to study cybersecurity.
For now, their summer plans are pretty relaxed — nothing to do with virtual learning or school.
“I plan to play games,” Darius Lewis said.
Originally, state officials had planned to host a graduation ceremony at its office near NRG Stadium. But after COVID-19 scattered its employees and shut down many state and local government offices, the team scrambled to get some semblance of a normal graduation in the works for more than 100 foster kids in the Greater Houston region, said Tiffani Butler, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.
Rather than the photo shoot planned at a local church before the pandemic, photographers instead came to snap portraits at Baldwin Park, where students were greeted with with cellophane-wrapped bags of snacks and silver graduation balloons.
Jewel-toned graduation gowns fluttered in the breeze as photographers and PAL staff helped jam too-tight cardboard-and-fabric caps over kids’ heads. A horde of foster parents joined them in the background like paparazzi, snapping shots on their smartphones.
Correy Lettsome, a senior at Klein High School, flashed his class ring at a photographer snapping photos of his royal-blue cap and gown. Classes finished up Thursday, and he was “happy” to be done with school, he said.
In the near future, he wants to train to be a chef, and perhaps someday, open up a restaurant in the Caribbean — doing it far away from the epicenters of the global pandemic and his worries about violence against black men in the States, and the protests that have come alongside the death of
George Floyd.
“I want to be making money and helping people,” Lettsome said.
Villagomez, the Spring Woods senior, is off to the University of Houston-Downtown this fall, where she plans to get a head start on a degree in education or social work. Her goal is to transfer to Sam Houston State University, her foster mom Lora Clay’s alma mater.
School has been strange in recent months, but with a fresh start at college on the horizon, she’s hopeful something will return to normal.
“I’m pretty sure we’re making everyone proud and managing well,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure we’re making everyone proud and managing well.”
Emily Villagomez, Spring Woods High School senior