It’s the end of lunch at Media Academy in Oakland, and students are heading back to class. One of them is Ronald Johnson. He’s a good student and he’s involved in lots of extracurricular activities.
“I’m in leadership, head of sound crew, I’m editor-in-chief at the newspaper,” he said. He’s also a second-year senior who was supposed to graduate last year.
Johnson gets help from Javarte Bamino, a college counselor with the independent program TRIO College Prep. “Ronald had to repeat his senior year because his freshman-year grades weren’t in the system,” Bamino said. “And we couldn’t find any of his information from his freshman year, so he just went from the ninth- to 10th-grade year, so he missed 65 credits.”
That’s right. Johnson’s freshman year was just lost — like it never happened. And because there is no record of him ever having attending his freshman year, his college applications we considered incomplete.