Arriving at success

There are excuses Krista McEwan could have used.

She could have said it's impossible to study in a house full of 11 relatives. She could have said her struggling school district didn't provide her with enough resources. She could have said the color of her skin comes with unfair societal hurdles.

But to do so would mean McEwan, 17, settles for mediocrity.

Instead, she spent each night doing homework on the floor of a bedroom she shared with her parents and two siblings. She tested her knowledge against peers who attended private school to make sure her teachers were giving her an adequate education. She wrote an essay delving into her racial identity and a childhood desire to be white. The essay helped gain her acceptance to 17 colleges.

McEwan is Roosevelt High School's valedictorian. In the fall, she will attend Boston University.

"I would do my work in the room, right on the floor, next to a light," she explained during a recent lunch break at school.

When McEwan was 5, she emigrated from Jamaica to the United States with her mother and younger brother because of a bad deal involving her father's auto business. "We lost everything," she said.

They left the island nation and moved in with her grandmother and other relatives in Roosevelt. Her father and a stepsister eventually joined them.

"I was used to working in those surroundings," she said. "My mom is very strict. We didn't have any excuses for not getting our work done."

McEwan's mother, Leonie, vowed that the living situation would be temporary and urged her children to find comfort living among loved ones.

"I'll do all the housework and the laundry so that nothing interferes with schoolwork," Leonie McEwan, 41, said. "I always tell them, your education is your only job."

While her parents pressed on to improve the family's living situation, with her mom working two jobs as a legal secretary and a receptionist and her father fixing air conditioners, McEwan applied the same perseverance to her education.

In high school, she's been involved in the drama club, tennis team and National Honor Society. During her senior year, she took two advanced placement classes - English language and composition, and chemistry. Outside of school, she dabbles in modeling, acting, dancing and horseback riding.

But because various troubles led Roosevelt to become the only district to be taken over by New York State, McEwan often felt like her education was lacking. "I kind of feel like the state let the school down," she said of classrooms without enough computers. "We work so hard at the school to make ends meet, to make sure we have sports when the budgets don't pass."

Instead of focusing on what's lacking, McEwan embraces the bright spots, notably the English department. "They're really amazing," she said of the English teachers.

It was in Dolores Farren- Sullivan's AP English language and composition class that McEwan discovered her writer's voice to express her identity struggle.

"One night, perched on my father's lap, I uttered the words, 'Daddy, I want to be white,'" she wrote in an essay that Farren-Sullivan said made an admissions officer cry. "The tears fell down his beautiful dark face, and I immediately experienced a sense of shame that I will take with me to my grave."

The essay goes on to discuss how a secret desire to be white was shared by Malcolm X and other great minds. "And so I now confess my secret to you and I hope to one day share yet another secret with my patients in a Park Avenue office," she wrote. "My new secret is this, 'I am Dr. McEwan, a beautiful black medical professional. As a surgeon, I will not only mend the hearts of my patients, but mend my father's broken heart."

Two years ago, her parents were able to buy a home in Roosevelt, where McEwan now has her own room.

"At first I was so scared," she said. "I thought it was too good to be true and it would get taken away."

That same kind of worry seeped in after she was accepted to Boston University, where tuition and other expenses add up to about $51,000.

So far she's earned $31,500 in financial aid, grants and scholarships.

"Something tells me that things will work out," she said. "But I worry a lot."

McEwan has a knack for succeeding despite hardship. Farren-Sullivan said she worries McEwan's AP scores won't be as high as they should be because the testing environment was noisy. "There was banging and there were kids yelling," Farren-Sullivan said, noting that her own son, a student in another district, took his tests in a silent library.

But Farren-Sullivan takes comfort that next year, things will be different. "I told her just wait till you sit in a library and enjoy five hours of studying or the aesthetic beauty of the campus."