A STREET-SMART SURVIVOR
After lifetime of struggles, St. Mike’s grad Desirae Tapia heading to NYC for fresh start studying theater production
She did it, Betsy. She actually did it. The little girl you cared for as a daughter and left in the hands of family when you died wound up taking the path of most resistance. But she has triumphantly — perhaps miraculously — made it to the finish line of her high school days.
Desirae Tapia, a street-smart St. Michael’s senior without an ounce of athletic ability (their words, not ours) recently put the finishing touches on the final trimester of high school with straight A’s. It ends a wild ride that nearly came off the rails more times than anyone can count, cementing her place as a graduate — and survivor — in the class of 2020.
Be proud, Betsy. Be happy. Most of all, be thankful it was your influence that played a role in getting her here — for better and worse.
“It’s taken a village to raise Desirae,” said St. Michael’s President Taylor Gantt. “There’s people pulling her from the front and pushing her from the back and she’s gotten off track several times. Yeah, there were times year to year where we didn’t know if she was going to make it back because all the stuff that’s going on with her, but I would say everyone’s pretty proud of the fact that she made it.”
Born to a father she has never known and a teenage mother who relinquished custody before her second birthday, Desirae was taken in by the woman she has always called “Mom” in 2004. Betsy Tapia was a popular and notoriously tough English teacher at St. Michael’s when she welcomed Desirae, her great niece, into her home.
The pair forged a bond that gave Desirae access to Betsy’s love for teaching and the hope of one day sitting as a student in her classroom.
“I still can walk into that classroom and know where all her old stuff used to be,” Desirae said. “A lot of ghosts are in there.”
Desirae’s formative years were spent getting to know her family, of forming a relationship with the fun aunt, Kathy Tapia, and living under the structured rules Betsy enforced. But everything ground to a tragic halt when Betsy died in 2012 at the age of 63 following a short illness. At the time, Desirae was just 10.
The loss sent her spiraling into years of emotional trauma and, as former St. Michael’s teacher Kendra Bartig described it, a grieving process that has played itself out in reverse. The acceptance phase seemed to come first, as months of shutting herself off were followed by an odd sense of normalcy.
The anger and denial phases came much later, Bartig said.
“There were lots of opportunities in Desirae’s teenage development years that she could have gone way off the deep end,” Bartig said. “All it took is one little jolt of the fishing pole and we were able to reel her back in, whereas some students you lose them completely. Desi, she had the strength and the wits and the common sense, I guess, to pull herself back.”
As a preteen, Desirae rebelled, lashed out and repeatedly pushed herself to the point of implosion. She filtered through three different schools as she settled into a life with Aunt Kathy, the fun aunt who suddenly wasn’t so fun to a kid with percolating emotional issues and a feeling of loss and abandonment.
“Everything I knew about my life was different and, yeah, I had a hard time with that,” Desirae said.
By seventh grade, she was admitted to St. Michael’s and, for the slimmest of moments, seemed ready to get back on track. Nearly every day she was given a ride to school by Diahann Larson, a close friend of Betsy’s and the school’s director of Lasallian ministry. She and Bartig lived just two streets over from Kathy Tapia’s place and saw Desirae frequently.
Every ride, Larson would do most of the talking. “Seventh grade, I was like, meh, they’re conversations, and in eighth grade, it was, meh, they’re just conversations,” Desirae said. “When I got to my junior year and I could drive, I missed those so much because I realized they kind of guided me and I never recognized that before. Diahann was teaching me about life and it took a long time to see it.”
It was those in-between snippets of her freshman and sophomore years when it went from bad to worse. Desirae skipped school and quit trying. Missing assignments piled up. Apathy and anger became the overriding forces.
“I didn’t recognize it at the time, but there was a disconnect with St. Mike’s because of my mom,” she said. “I was, like, I don’t want to be here.”
As revered as Betsy was as a teacher, it was a side of her that Desirae never got to know. The woman who molded her had an invisible side that would have been the icing on the cake for a little girl craving more structure.
“Other people got to experience her more fully than I did because school was her life,” Desirae said. “I was in it, but school was it for her. I remember doing workbooks over the summer just so I would stay caught up, but when I finally went there all I heard was stories about her. Yeah, I felt almost deprived of not having that. Her old classroom, I did my very best to avoid it.”
Home life was no picnic, either. By Desirae’s own account, she made things miserable with Kathy.
On the verge of flunking out of St. Mike’s her sophomore year, Larson and Bartig stepped in. Kathy approached them with the idea of having Desirae stay with them for a while in hopes of getting her academics in order.
Two years later, the kid who nearly steered her life into the abyss seems to have gotten it together. She lived with Larson and Bartig all that time, becoming a solid student in the process.
“Desi was definitely pushing the limits,” Larson said. “It was a temporary thing for as long as it needed to be.”
“Well, this was as long as it needed to be,” Bartig added.
Desirae filled her time working two or three jobs, doing so much on the side she barely had time to live what some might consider the traditional life of a high school kid. She didn’t play sports, didn’t join clubs or do much else except work and school.
Gantt classifies the last eight years of Tapia’s life as a transformational experience others should notice.
“She’s an average student and she wasn’t killing it, grade-wise,” he said. “But she’s not scared of failing, not scared of stuff that’s hard. She’s had a rough go, she’s not perfect and she’s certainly made her share of mistakes. But one of her really good choices was being independent. Her street smarts — I mean that kid has a Ph.D. in life education.”
Gantt taught a religion class that required students to spend the final months of their senior year volunteering at a school or nonprofit that serves the greater good. As usual, Tapia took the most challenging route and cold-called a senior assisted living facility instead of doing what most students do — reading to elementary kids or volunteering at a food bank.
“I think it speaks to her personality that she didn’t take the usual path,” Gantt said. “Sometimes students in that class just abdicate the responsibility of finding something they want to do for something that’s easy. She didn’t take that route at all. She never did. With anything.”
Tapia’s next step is to spend the summer moving back into her aunt’s house, then shipping off to New York City this fall to study theater production at Borough of Manhattan Community College. For the Google-minded, it’s a small school along the Hudson River roughly halfway between the World Trade Center and the fictitious Friends Greenwich Village apartments of Chandler, Joey, Rachel and Monica.
Ten years from now, Desirae said, she’d like to be working behind the scenes in a play, maybe even calling some of the shots. Who knows? More than that, though, she’d rather have people recognize her not for her past or what she experienced along the way.
“I just want people to see me for the work that I do, for the effort I put in,” she said. “I’d really like people to find me doing something that’s exciting to me.” Be proud, Betsy.
Your little girl did it.