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Rymeir Mortimore
“I had to give it up – being 18 in the 10th grade”
Rymeir Mortimore dropped out of Dobbins Vo-Tech as an 18-year-old tenth grader. His checkered school career included three years at Community Education Partners (CEP), a discipline school, where he was sent at age 13. He is now 19 and in a program at the Center For Literacy preparing for the Gateway to College program at Community College. He wrote this with the assistance of Cortney Bruno, his teacher there.
“There are many reasons why I left school. Here goes some of them.… It started when I was about seven years old when my dad left us. I don’t know why, but he did. So my mom had to take care of all six of us by herself. So now in middle school I was acting out for no reason. I didn’t do no work. I came to school when I wanted to. I just wanted to fight and have a good time. So my middle school, Penn Treaty, got rid of me and I went to CEP.
“Being in CEP was not the best thing for me. I didn’t learn nothing, I was there for three years of my life that I will not get back.… An average day at CEP is get there, get to class and start talking to friends. All the work is on the computers but we barely get on the computers anyway.”
At CEP, Rymeir stopped attending regularly halfway through his second year. The school threatened to drop him from the rolls but never did. After learning little, he said, and accumulating no high school credits, he managed to get a transfer to Dobbins.
“When I left CEP and went to Dobbins, they put me in the ninth grade, and in CEP I was in the 11th grade. So I was now sixteen in the ninth grade and that was not a fun place to be at, at that time. The kids in my classes were about fourteen to fifteen, and I was too old to be there.
“I was not going to be a dropout, but I had to give it up being 18 in the 10th grade. I wanted to cry. I thought I would never drop out of school but I did, and that is not the end of it. I tried to hide it from my godfather (who is like a father that I never had). He is one of the reasons I am here now, him, my mom and my grandma.”
When Rymeir dropped out, he was living with his two brothers, who were one and three years older.
“I was out of school acting like I was in school so my godfather wouldn’t get mad at me, I was home doing nothing but playing card games with my brothers. So I was doing that for about six months, and my mom had enough of me so she came down to my house and had a talk with me. She told me ‘Why are you giving up?’ I said I am not giving up. I just don’t want to be in a class with them [younger] kids acting like a fool. She said ‘Didn’t you act like a fool when you was fifteen?’ I didn’t want to hear any more, but I knew she was right, so I tried to get back in school, but they said I missed too many days.
“So me and my mom went back home and she told me, ‘If I found a school for you to go to, would you go?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to be with any kids two or more years younger then me.’ So she found the Gateway to College.”