Pimmit Hills High School Seniors Tell Their Stories & Accept Opportunity at Graduation

By Darien Bates

This time of the year, in high schools across the country, seniors in robes and mortarboards will walk through halls and across stages to accept diplomas, handshakes and applause, as they move their tassels from right to left. These graduation ceremonies, all virtually identical from Connecticut to California, are held annually to honor for students the first step into adulthood and the next stage of life.

But while many of the speeches given by valedictorians, class presidents and guest speakers focus on the travails faced and the roads ahead, for the majority of those honored this day, the immediate future is, and has long been determined to be college, especially in the Northern Virginia area where nearly 90% of all high school graduates continue their education after high school.

With at least one more matriculation in the future of most high school seniors, the weight of the ceremony has lost some of the importance once attributed to it. But for some, like the seniors from Pimmit Hills High School, who accepted their diplomas last Wednesday in the auditorium of George C. Marshall High School, the day still signifies an enormous achievement and the start of a life that replaces old challenges with new promise.

An alternative high school in the Pimmit Hills area of Falls Church, Pimmit Hills High School serves a student body comprised of teenagers and adults who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to attend regular high school. Some weren’t able to meet the schedule requirements of standard high school because they needed to work to support themselves or a family. Others weren’t able to continue because of discipline or academic issues. But the majority of the students are facing the twin obstacles of language and cultural differences as they struggle to make a life in the United States, moving here from another country.

The first of three student speakers at the graduation ceremony, Kadijah Jalloh shared her own story to the packed auditorium of how she came to Pimmit Hills, and more importantly, how she’s leaving it.

A native of Sierra Leone, Jalloh grew up in an area of Freetown where education was a low priority, especially among the women, most of whom dropped of school prior to receiving a high school education.

In that environment, and in spite of it, Jalloh said she had always wanted to be educated, idolizing those women who were able to buck poverty and culture and get a college degree.

“I grew up determined to be one of the few honored and respected girls in my country. Not just for myself, but also to be a model for others,” she said.

But in January of 1998, the civil war, which had been raging through the country, reached the capital city. With the war tearing the city apart, Jalloh escaped to New Guinea, leaving behind the country she knew and her dreams of an education.

For five years Jalloh lived in New Guinea, growing further estranged from the idea that she could be that woman she imagined when she was young. “I accepted I was a failure,” she said.

But then in 2003, with the help of her mother, Jalloh moved to the U.S. Struggling with the language and culture, she enrolled at Pimmit Hills hoping just to get a handle on her life again. Not only did it help her establish a cultural foundation, but with the beginning of school, she also rediscovered her love for learning and her ambition to get an education.

Now, just two years later, she has found herself in a very different place than that girl who thought she had lost all hope of a future when she fled her home.

Jalloh will attend Northern Virginia Community College next year then transfer to George Mason in two years to get her degree in nursing. She plans to return to Sierra Leone to work with children hurt in the fighting there.

Following Jalloh, Simon Woldentensae from Ethiopia and Reidaldo Jandres-Hernandez, each shared their own histories of how they found ways past what appeared to be dead-ends through their attendance at Pimmit Hills. Hernandez finished his speech, thanking in Spanish his parents and friends who supported him.

But it was Jalloh who summed the evening up best, taking a quote from Mother Theresa, Jalloh told her fellow graduates, “Life is a promise, let’s fulfill it.” The crowd erupted into applause.