Photo Credit: Kyla Calvert
By Kyla Calvert
On the last Friday of the school year, seniors at Crawford Invention and Design Educational Academy in City Heights are lined up for a barbecue. Later in the afternoon they’ll rehearse for graduation. Like most high school grads, they’ll hear from their valedictorian, Idris Ahmed, whose speech is ready to go.
“The message will basically be that even though we’re departing ways there’s still like a lot to do in life,” he said.
That’s saying something considering what Ahmed has already done. He is going to Stanford in the fall and is one of San Diego Unified’s six Gates Millennium Scholars. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation chooses 1,000 seniors from across the country every year. They get full financial aid for four years of college. If they choose areas like the sciences, education, engineering or computer science their graduate studies are covered, too.
These accomplishments are impressive on their own, but their distance from where this Somali refugee began life could be considered staggering.