Jul 13, 2009 6:35 pm US/Pacific
Jeanelle Hope: Hope Starts In East Oakland
High school student leader with no parents gets two AA degrees as well as finishing high school
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) ―
It was a gray and drizzly, the day I met Jeanelle Hope, deep in the Redwood forests of Oakland. She was pulling out invasive French broom, as she put it "liberating some trees." It was on a Sunday morning, when most teenagers would be sleeping in. Jeanelle didn't seem like a 17-year-old though. She seemed more like an adult. Later, I would find out why.
Not far from that redwood canyon as the crow flies, is the neighborhood where Jeanelle grew up, in East Oakland. Most of the city's murders happen there. She lived not far from the area where four Oakland police officers were shot and killed in 2009.
"There were times I would walk down the street and I would see people selling drugs," she recalled. "Liquor stores on every corner, and you know, you just have this focus not to get caught into it. There are men roaming around and shooting and violence and people driving fast, it was East Oakland, it was crazy."
Jeanelle was the child of a hardworking, single mom, a latchkey kid. Her mom had one goal: to see that her little girl got a good education and a future. She scrimped and saved, and found scholarship money to send Jeanelle a private school. That meant Jeanelle had to walk 6 blocks to the bus stop by herself everyday - something she remembers clearly.
"I was a little girl and men would look at me as if was an older woman and there were many times when men would come up to me at BART stations, waiting for buses and it was very uncomfortable," she said. "One day I called my mom and I was crying because I didn't know what to do. it was hard, but I had to go through it to get to school."
There was mandatory reading at night, after homework. Even before she got into middle school, her mother was telling her about the importance of the SAT and the ACT tests. But not long after that lecture, when Jeanelle was eleven years old, her mother suddenly died of a heart attack.
Her Grandmother took her in.
"My focus was just so on her and I wanted to know that she would be ok through this," said Jean Winston. "Losing a mother at her age and as close as they were, I just had to let her know that…times are rough, but it's going to get better, it's going to get better".
Jean Winston went back to work to support her granddaughter. "It made me feel wanted," said Jeanelle. "She was helping me overcome all the grief that I had lost from the loss of my mother. She helped me heal, she helped me learn to love again and open my heart again to other people."
At school, her mother's relentless focus on education paid off. At Middle College High, she stood out.
"She would ask questions that covered things that weren't in the high school history book and questions that challenged me," recalled her history teacher, Steve Hoffman. "She reminded me more of a college student. I thought she might be getting some sort of coaching, or maybe her father's a history professor or something. She just really knew her material and just struck me as someone very mature."
Middle College High is on the campus of the Contra Costa Community College, so Jeanelle was able to take college classes while she was still in high school.
Then she was elected President, not of the high school, but the college!
"She's participated in a lot of the college speech and debate tournaments and I think that's given her the public speaking skills to really impress a wide audience and speak to a wide audience and so she just took over the election," said Hoffman.
"I am so proud of her," said her grandmother. "I just wish her mom could have seen how she has just evolved into a young lady. She is focused. She is a little old soul. She makes decisions that you wouldn't think a 17-year-old would make. She plans things, I mean from the beginning to the end. She has every base touched."
And Jeanelle has her own message for her mother.
"I want her to know that her hard work wasn't done in vain," she said. "I want her to know that I am going to be fine and that I am going to make something of myself and that I am going to go off to college…I understand everything she was teaching me now finally… the reading the strictness, the street smarts, its all paying off. Its all making sense now and I thank her for it."
Jeanelle Hope finished high school early, and graduated with two A.A. degrees from Contra Costa College this year. Now she goes on to Cal State Long Beach. She wants to be an educator.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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