I'm from Providence originally, though I've moved back and forth between Providence and Warwick for a lot of my life. I've been at Central all four years—it's all right, I guess. No, it's been cool.
Coming in here, everyone was telling me that it was a horrible place to be, that students were acting up, academic-wise it was bad. But when I got here, I realized what they were saying was all talk. It didn't seem to stick. It took me a little while—I'd say second or third quarter of my freshman year—but I realized that what they were telling me wasn't true.
Before I came here, I expected the teachers not to really care, and I expected the students to be bad—but they're not. There are some teachers here that really want to push you, but that's not true with all of them. My thing is that as long as I want to learn, and as long as I want to do well, I will.
I'll be lifeguarding all summer, and then I'll be going to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm hoping to study something with computers, and to play football. I'm captain of the Central football team. This year it was in the news about how we changed our record around. Since 1997 we've had losing records. I started playing my sophomore year, and sophomore and junior year we didn't win a single game. Then we turned it around. Under a new head coach we went 10-2, lost in the Super Bowl to Moses Brown. Then, because of some players that turned out to be ineligible, we were granted wins for our two losses and were handed the state title for our division. I'm going to miss my teammates that I leave behind when I graduate. I'm a little nervous about going down to a new place where I don't know anyone, but I think I'll be all right.
There has been a lot of change from my freshman to my senior year. Just me knowing that the work has to get done, that this is what I have to do in order to get a good grade, I'm just going to push myself. During football season, a lot of my motivation comes from knowing that if I don't do well enough, there's a chance that I won't play. I've grown to love the sport so much that I want to keep playing, so I keep pushing. My motivation comes from sports, my parents always telling me to push, and just from watching them, seeing how hard it is for them. My father, he struggles. He does all the working in the world, but bills still come in and it's tough. I don't want it to be like that for me.
If I could change anything, it would be to increase student support—like come to sports games. I wish there were just more people having pride in the school. We need them to back us up. I think it's up to the students to do it—they just have to want to. You don't want to force anyone, you can't do that. They just have to want to represent their school wherever they go.
Whatever school you go to, there are going to be kids that are negative about classes or sports, or whatever. It varies from school to school, but it's too bad that people only think of it as happening at Central. It makes me feel really frustrated. I feel a lot of anger—I don't understand why people have to label us like that. But I can't let people like that bother me. I have goals set, that I have to reach—I can't let negative people like that bring me down. My goals are to graduate from high school, to go down to Morehouse, meet new people, do new things, have fun, further my education, and get a well-paying job so that I can help my parents, because I'm tired of seeing them have to struggle. Those are my main goals.
Jon Delacruz>>
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