Cathy Campos

Profile

IT’S JUNE, WHICH MEANS it’s high school graduation time, when all over San Diego “Pomp and Circumstance” will be playing as seniors line up to collect their coveted diplomas. Cathy Campos is one of those high school seniors. But then, in many ways, she’s not. Campos is graduating from Monarch School, a downtown school for homeless children and the largest of its kind in the nation. High school graduation is a familiar rite of passage, yet Campos’ life has had little in common with other area graduates, who hail from well-manicured neighborhoods like Carmel Valley, Poway and Solana Beach.

Campos is Mexican, the daughter of recent immigrants. Her father worked in construction, and her mother stayed home with Campos and her 10 brothers and sisters. When Campos was in fifth grade, her father lost his job, and the family——which lived paycheck to paycheck——stayed at the Rescue Mission downtown for six months. Campos became a student at Monarch until her father got work again and moved the family to El Cajon, where she attended middle school.

“There were seven of us then. My mother was pregnant, and we lived in a two-bedroom apartment the size of a one-bedroom,” Campos says. Two years later, her father was out of work again, and the family moved back to the Rescue Mission for a while and then Cortez Hill, another downtown shelter. Whenever Campos was homeless, she attended Monarch.

“It’s never hard to come back here,” she says, sitting at a table in the dining and lounge area at the school, chatting with everyone who passes by. “Every time I was here, I’d see friends. I know all the staff and teachers. It’s my second home.”

The family bounced around from one small apartment to another——at one point, eight of them lived in a studio in Escondido. By that time, her father had left them.

“We would all sit in one room, and I would tell everyone to do something quietly so I could do my homework,” she says.

When they wound up back at the Rescue Mission during her junior year, she came back to Monarch for good. Now, as her senior year comes to a close, Campos is working hard to maintain her solid GPA while participating in myriad after-school activities——an outdoor outreach program that has given her the chance to snow board, snorkel and learn to ride a bike; a book club; a job at the student store; and weekend volunteer work at her church, where she delivers food to the hungry.

Campos’ graduation is a testament to her determination. Despite repeated bouts of homelessness, cramped living conditions and poverty, she managed to excel both in and out of the classroom. In the fall, she heads to San Diego City College and plans eventually to transfer to a four-year college. On a recent tour of California colleges, she fell in love with Berkeley.

“That’s my dream,” says Campos, who wants to be an elementary-school teacher. “I’ve had all this bad stuff happen to me, the homelessness and being poor, but a lot of good things have happened to me, too. I remember one time my dad and I were at Office Depot and some lady paid for our stuff. She just did this nice thing and said, ‘I hope when you get older you will do this for someone, too.’ And I always keep that in my mind,” says Campos. “That I am going to do something good for someone else.”

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