City Making Some Gains In Literacy, GED Efforts

After losing his leg in an accident, Isaac Love, 46, decided to try to get his general equivalency diploma. He will graduate Saturday. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

Many students face significant obstacles to learning, such as heavy, inflexible work schedules, patchy English or addiction to alcohol or drugs, Oberwetter said. Even the most dedicated students can study for years before they're ready to take the GED exam. Citywide last year, only 57 percent of those who sat for the test actually passed it.

All of which is a testament to Isaac Love's accomplishment, Oberwetter said. "It's really amazing when a student finishes what they started," she said. "It is really mind blowing."

Love, who lives in Southeast Washington, showed up at Catholic Community Services nearly three years ago with a newly fitted prosthetic leg and a burning ambition to get his diploma. Although he had completed the 11th grade before dropping out of Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School in the 1970s and had years of minimum-wage jobs, testing showed his reading and math skills hovered around the fourth-grade level.

"I could read," Love said. "The basics I was able to deal with." But after years of working with shovels, brooms and tape measures, "paper was a whole new thing. I had to get used to focusing on so many words and paragraphs and sentences."

Raised by attentive foster parents, Love said, he did well in elementary school but began to lose focus in middle school, "when things turned kind of sour with the bullies." He changed schools and entered Roosevelt, where girls and parties were a new distraction. He won promotion to the 12th grade but decided to follow in the footsteps of his foster father, a construction worker.

"It was easy to get a job at the snap of a finger back then," Love said. "I was thinking, 'Get a job. Buy a car. I'm an adult now.' "

Briefly married in his 20s, Love has two sons, Prince Lord, now 20, and Isaac Jr., now 18. He lost touch with them for a time after the divorce and went back to the bachelor's life. He was working for a D.C. staffing agency, temporarily assigned to a commercial garbage truck, when the accident occurred in Bethesda.

"After I lost my leg, I realized what a whole lot of college athletes hear after a big injury: You still have your mind," Love said. "Had I finished that 12th grade, I probably could have carried that to an employer and been more prepared to get an office position."

Love was lucky. Insurance covered most of his expenses, and he won a large jury verdict against the trash hauler, USA Waste of Maryland, in 2004. The case is on appeal.

But Love wanted to work. An insurance case manager provided job leads, "but as hard as I applied, I never got hired," Love said. "So I decided to devote my total concentration to the GED."

It took him nearly 2 1/2 years. He spent a year on reading comprehension. Another nine months were devoted to math. Love went to class for four hours almost every day, then worked on his own for three or four hours more.

"It was like any form of exercise," he said. "That's the way I felt: I'm getting strong mentally working out with these books and skills."

Love sat for the GED three times, earning a passing score on the final section in December 2005. He's already thinking about college, perhaps UDC. In the meantime, he's looking forward to Saturday's graduation ceremony, a rite of passage his sons already have experienced.

"After seeing them graduate," Love said, "I thought it would be interesting to walk across the stage."