By Ze Segundo, Special to The Post
This is an autobiographical statement by a former Street Academy student who overcame many obstacles in the1970s, attended S.F. State University, and built a successful life for herself.
I was born and raised in Oakland, living in a household with a single mother and eight children. My life was chaotic: I never felt loved, never hearing the words, “I love you.”
I was 4 years old when all of us were sent to foster homes. There, my little sister and I were tortured. I believe we were there a little over a year.
When we finally returned home to our mother, she had a new husband who was very abusive to all of us including my mother.
I and my other sisters were sexually abused by two uncles and my big brother. I remember my uncle choking me and telling me if I told anyone, he would kill me and my little brother – so I didn’t tell. I was terrified of him. I tried to stay away from him as much as possible, but that’s kind of hard to do when a sexual predator lives with you.
My mother would have parties on the weekends where there would be many people drinking and fighting. The police were often at my home. I hated Sunday mornings because my mother would make us kids clean up after the parties. The house had the stench of cigarettes and booze.
Having to clean up other people’s vomit made me sick to my stomach. This is when I started to drink myself. Taking sips of leftover alcohol in glasses and beer cans. That would be the start of my alcoholism.
I started cutting myself when I was 11 years old and didn’t know why. I think it was because it made me feel something different and somehow made whatever I was feeling go away for the moment.
I didn’t have many friends and didn’t have any social skills. I was very shy and withdrawn. In my early teen I couldn’t look people in the eyes. If I was walking down the street and someone was walking towards me, I would purposely cross the street, so I didn’t have to have contact with them.
I was terrified of the world around me. I didn’t even talk to my mother much because I didn’t know what kind of mood she would be in. I learned to stay silent and stay away from her.
My grandmother lived in Hayward; my sister, brother and I took a bus from Oakland to attend junior high school there. Because I didn’t have any social skills, the kids would tease me and bully me. I had to fight a lot, so much that my brother and I were kicked out; they didn’t want any of us in their schools.
After we were kicked out of the school district, I tried to attend a junior high in Oakland, but the noise in the classroom overwhelmed me. The sounds rumbled in my ears.
Again, I was bullied and teased. So, I stopped going to school. I would leave the house with my brothers and sisters but didn’t set foot into any classroom after that. I just wandered the streets until it was time to go home.
It was a very chaotic home life, and I was a severely abused child, overwhelmed with everything around me.
When I was 15, a social worker talked to my mother about sending me to Oakland Street Academy. My mother thought it was a continuation school, where the worst students went.
I didn’t want to go to Street Academy, fearful of being bullied again, but I was tired of hanging out in the street all day. I thought the Street Academy was strange, a school that took over an old furniture store building. It was an open floor plan with partitions that sectioned off classes.
During class, we could hear the buses go by and people talking as they were walking by. I was still painfully shy and withdrawn. I would show up to school early, so I didn’t have to walk past other students in the classroom. I didn’t speak to any students and barely spoke to the teachers. Even when class was going on, I would sit across the room in a small chair and table between two lockers.
I isolated myself from the rest of the class, not really knowing why, but that’s where I sat. I had a third-grade reading level at age 15 and couldn’t spell much at all.
The first time a teacher pulled up a chair to sit next to me to help me out, I panicked because no adult had ever sat so close to me in any kind of a caring or helping way. My English teacher, Kitty (Epstein), would make the biggest impact in my life. I didn’t know then what it meant to have a teacher who would care about me enough to spend her precious time with me even through all of my frustration about learning and thinking the whole time I couldn’t learn anything because I thought I was stupid.
Kitty told me that I could learn, and that there were no stupid students. I remember one time a small group of students walked to fast food restaurants just to read the menu because reading anything is better than reading nothing at all.
Kitty didn’t give up on me – so, I didn’t give up on myself.
School was difficult for me because so many things were going on at home. It was hard for me to focus, but the teachers were really patient with me. Street Academy empowered students by teaching Chicano studies and Black studies. We were learning about our own histories and cultures. Street Academy students participated in demonstrations like the United Farm Workers grape boycott of the mid-1970s. We learned that we could make a difference with our voices. It was a great self-esteem builder.
In many ways, Street Academy saved my life because I was going nowhere.
The minute I set foot into that school I knew it was something special. It took me four years to graduate because I was so far behind in my schooling, and I was dyslexic.
When I left Street Academy, I was reading college material and attended San Francisco State University. I was the first in my family to graduate high school and the first to go to college. As a 15-year-old with CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), I accomplished what I thought would never happen to me.
I am grateful to the school’s staff and what Street Academy stands for. Schools and teachers should treat students like human beings, care about them, spend a little extra time, believe in them, and they will believe in themselves because you never know what students are going through and what they have experienced in their past that affects their learning.
There are no stupid kids, bad kids, or lazy kids, only kids who need to be understood and loved. Street Academy gave all of that to me.
During the 1970s, Ze Segundo attended the Oakland Street Academy, an Oakland Unified School District school now known as Emiliano Zapata Street Academy located at 417 29th St. in Oakland.
