Meet Our Students

Applying to Breakthrough as a fourth grader, Nashira had mixed feelings at first about spending her summer in school. That changed once the summer program began. “On the first day, I was so excited!” she says. “The classes, the teachers – we had so much fun.”

Nashira fit right in at Breakthrough and worked hard. In math class, she studied operations with fractions and positive and negative integers. She discovered a knack for problem solving, and liked the math-related games and her teacher Jeena’s insistence that every student learn the material – “She wouldn’t stop teaching until we really knew it.” In planetary science, Nashira learned about gravity, atmosphere, and the water cycle, and made a model of Earth for her end-of-summer project. In writing class, a unique voice began to emerge – one full of sensory detail, and with solid paragraph structure.

A cheerleader and dancer, Nashira was enthusiastic pretty much all the time. She helped her club earn the Most Spirited award, and pushed her advisory to win the Breakthrough-wide reading competition. On Culture Day, she performed a dance with her mom – a mother-daughter moment that brought cheers from the audience. She also made it several rounds into the water balloon toss at Olympics before finally getting soaked.

Breakthrough was a two-year program when Nashira started. But during her sixth grade year, Breakthrough secured the funding to expand, growing into an eight-year program with four-year college attendance as the ultimate goal. Nashira stuck with it for the six years that followed. She gained admission to St. Ignatius College Preparatory School as a ninth grader and continued to work hard and succeed academically, while giving back to Breakthrough as an after-school program tutor and summer volunteer. In the spring of 2018, she graduated both from high school and from Breakthrough, a member of our inaugural graduating class. She is currently a sophomore at San Jose State University.

“I appreciate Breakthrough so much,” she says. “I don’t believe I would’ve been able to get here without them. They’ve helped me through it all.”

Walking the Breakthrough hallways, you might hear a student or teacher calling out “Cheese!” Angel, a.k.a. Cheese, was given the nickname at age two by his brother Emmanuel who said he smiled all the time. “I’m always smiling,” Cheese confirms. “It’s just something special I have in me.”

Now in his fourth year at Breakthrough, Cheese has enthusiasm for the program that is equally evident. When he came to Breakthrough after fourth grade, he was nervous that the program would be hard and that his shy nature would be difficult to overcome.  Now much more confident, he says the key to success is to keep your binder organized so you always know what tasks you have to complete, and that making friends is easy at Breakthrough: “We have the most well behaved students, and they always say good things about each other.”

Cheese grew a tremendous amount over the years. Reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian as a seventh grader inspired a deep love for literature. In writing class, he worked on persuasive five-paragraph essays and selected a topic close to his heart – recommendations for the Giants’ new catcher following Buster Posey’s knee injury. In science, he discovered the Earth’s many layers and how convection causes tectonic plates to move across the Earth’s surface. One of the highlights of Cheese’s experience thus far was the outdoor education trip, when he and his fellow Breakthrough students camped under the stars and “saw the wilderness in real life, rather than in a book.”

But the teachers are what Cheese thinks makes Breakthrough especially unique. “They’re always positive and bringing us up. Every teacher is my favorite because I know all of them want to help me succeed.”

Cheese attended Stuart Hall and, for the past several summers, has returned to Breakthrough as a Volunteer Leadership Participant, assisting with program operations and serving as a role model for younger Breakthrough students. Cheese knows the homework schedule and fast pace of his summers at Breakthrough have prepared him for future success. A Posse Scholar, he is currently a sophomore at Boston University.