US$5,000 reward for Trini teenager

A TRINIDADIAN teenager was among three youths who were each awarded US$5,000 in New York last night for defying the odds and setting the example by moving along the right path. Casey Selby, 17, and two other teen-agers were honoured by the Children’s Defence Fund at the annual Beat the Odds awards last night in New York, the New York Daily News reported yesterday. One had to learn to control her violent impulses. Another succeeded in school despite his parents’ disinterest. A third resisted the drug-ridden path his mother took, and forged a love of science. Tsaiquan Bacon, Daniel Tejada and Casey Selby, each 17, are college-bound and ready for the future — against the terrible odds they were dealt as children.

Daniel Tejada has spent most of his 17 years in the Linden Houses in Brooklyn — a tough place to grow up for a young man with dreams of success and little support at home. “It’s been kind of hard and everything,” Daniel said. “A lot of the people I grew up with out there, they do drugs and a whole bunch of other stuff.” Daniel’s parents, both unemployed high school dropouts, have shown little interest in his development, he said, forcing the teen to seek guidance from outside the home: an uncle and a friend from the neighbourhood now in college. Daniel realised early on that his only hope of a better life was to make sure he goes to college. “I felt education was the only way out,” he said. “Even if the education system is messed up, you have to work with it.”

Daniel has made the most of his schooling, earning top grades at Westinghouse High School, where he belongs to the Robotics Club, Student Government and Quality Steering Committee. He also founded the school’s Video Game Club. Daniel is now waiting to find out whether he would be admitted to upstate Skidmore College. “Look at me,” he urged other young people who are growing up under difficult circumstances. “I won a scholarship. I’m on my way to going to a well-known college. Keep your hopes and dreams alive.” As a little girl, Casey Selby led a relatively tranquil life, under the care of her doting grandmother in Trinidad. But when her grandmother died, the seven-year-old came to live in New York with her biological parents — a jarring transition that filled her with uncontrollable rage.

Her schoolmates teased her about her accent and her late grandma — and Casey turned to violence to vent her anger, often beating up boys. “I had a little temper problem,” she said. Casey said she noticed that her older sister kept getting into trouble in school and at home, and Casey realised she needed to get her act together. Casey began focusing on studies and positive activities at school. “I don’t want to get into the kind of trouble that a lot of kids my age are doing,” she said. “I’m better off working and doing something constructive.” As a topnotch student at Edward R Murrow High School in Brooklyn, she is active in the school gospel choir, dance team and steel drum orchestra.

Her father is no longer in her life, and her mother is unemployed because of a disability. Casey supports herself with a job at the Cookie House at Kings Plaza as the head pretzel maker. “I’m saving my money because I want to be able to pay for my books when I go to college,” she said. Casey has worked so hard at school that she will graduate early — this January — and hopes to go to Hunter College to study to be a registered nurse. “If I could save five people a day, that would make me feel better,” she said.