My sister worked at a housing corporation in Harlem. That address became my entry point into a private Catholic school in Manhattan that my mother believed would give me a better education than what was available in our neighborhood in Brooklyn. She was not wrong about that. What she was navigating, even if she did not name it that way at the time, was a system where access to quality education was determined by where you lived.
What I understand now is that this was not a personal workaround. It was the result of decades of policy decisions that concentrated resources in some communities and stripped them from others, leaving families like mine to figure out how to move within systems that were never designed for us.
So, every weekday in seventh and eighth grade, I took the L train to the 6 train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Two hours each way. When teachers and nuns and priests asked why I was always late, I made up answers. I was thirteen years old, pretending to live somewhere I did not, making a two-hour commute before school started, and learning early that navigating institutions sometimes means performing a version of yourself that the institution finds acceptable.
People who know me now sometimes ask why I am so disciplined. That commute is part of the answer.
After graduating from Saint Ann's, I was accepted to Cristo Rey, which at the time was a brand-new school. I was part of only the second class to ever walk through those doors, which means everything about the experience was still being figured out in real time.
The model was unusual. Four days a week you were in school, seven in the morning until four in the afternoon. On the fifth day, you went to work at a real corporate job in the city. Not a program. Not a simulation. An actual professional environment where you were expected to show up, perform, and represent the school.
