We Are High Achievers, But We Were Almost a Statistic

Briauna and Tiauna Black: When tragedy struck, a hybrid school provided the flexibility and support needed to move from high school to career.

When we began high school, we had an exciting future all mapped out and were well on our way to achieving it. As twin sisters, we both played varsity basketball and were excelling academically at our Las Vegas high school. We felt we had purpose, with plans to build careers in sports medicine after experiencing our own injuries on the court.

We were fortunate to have a lot of support at home. We had each other to compete against and support on the court and in the classroom. Our mother was always there encouraging us to persevere through challenging schoolwork by looking at problems from different perspectives and cheering for us at every game. We knew what we wanted in life, and we had the support, tools, and drive to get it.

When tragedy struck, we suddenly needed something more: flexibility and understanding. We found that at an alternative hybrid school.

Our mother had Type 1 diabetes during our whole life, but in our junior year of high school it got worse. She needed around-the-clock help, including support from us. We tried to make it work for the first two years, but it just got to be too much. Plus our minds were in a different place. We weren’t interested in dances and socializing. We were always thinking about our mother. We were dealing with bigger problems than what to wear to school. We looked into online programs for school and picked Clark County Acceleration Academies (CCAA), a hybrid alternative school that was available through our school district.

We were able to set our own pace and had the flexibility to meet our school obligations while focusing on taking care of our mother. We were able to make our own decisions about our school/life balance. Our teachers at CCAA were understanding when we had to leave school early, and they offered the support we needed to get us through the times when our mother’s illness meant we had to put school on the back burner.

We had to be mature. We didn’t go to school to play and hang out, but to get work done. We were responsible for our own success and finally had a structure that allowed us to manage that responsibility on our own terms, along with plenty of personal support. Wendy Thompson, former district director at CCAA, checked on us every week. If there was something we couldn’t do, she would help us or find someone who could. Just her constant presence and caring about our schoolwork and our personal well-being filled a void and helped us not feel so adrift. She helped us fill out college applications and sorted out a plan for how we would start a career and get the training we needed.

Miss Wendy also helped us pursue our college plans once we graduated. After our mom died, we were at a loss for how to move on to that next chapter; the idea of working and running a home and tackling college at the same time was just too much. Miss Wendy called us every day for a week and asked “What’s wrong? What can we do to make this easier?” She helped us realize we could still pursue our dreams in the medical field.

Today we’re both medical assistants. We went through a training program at Northwest Career College and earned medical assistant licenses and phlebotomy certifications in nine months. Now we are pursuing bachelors of science degrees in nursing through a different hybrid program at Grand Canyon University. All the prerequisite courses are offered online and then students complete their clinical work at the school’s hospital in Henderson, Nevada.

We wish more high school students knew that there are alternatives to traditional high school. A hybrid school like what we did in high school and now in college is a great option. There are some young people who need the social interaction an in-person environment offers, but there are also a lot of us who face challenges or who just want something different.

It takes a lot of strength and drive to persevere through challenges, and we were fortunate to have each other to lean on as well as lots of adults who helped us along the way. We needed each other to push us forward, and we needed supportive adults who trusted us enough to follow our own school pathway on our own terms.

We have benefitted so much from an alternative pathway through school to a career that we’ve aspired to for years. We want to make sure other students are aware of alternatives that will allow them to focus on their families while meeting their own expectations, so they can achieve their dreams no matter what happens, too.

View the original article here.

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