Whatever Happened to The Class of 2005?

A classmate of Butler's at Cardozo, Laura John-Toussaint, also struggled with the culture there.

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She said she begged her mother to let her transfer out because she was continually heckled for being smart. If you achieve "you're a nerd. You're not cool," said John-Toussaint, who grew up on the island of Trinidad.

Her mother told her to stick it out. "Anywhere you go, it will be the same as long as you excel. So you have to cope with it," said Sharon St. Clair, her mother and a teacher at a special education school in Northeast Washington.

John-Toussaint joined the debate team, which brought her new friends and lifted her spirits. When the team traveled to other schools across the country, John-Toussaint couldn't help but note the better facilities such as science labs stocked with gloves and goggles -- basic equipment lacking at Cardozo. She and her teammates would see "what they had and what we didn't have."

John-Toussaint followed her mother's advice. She became president of her class and graduated among the top 10 students. Her classmates voted her most likely to win a Nobel Prize and most likely to become president. She won a debating scholarship and is attending the University of Oklahoma.

But like some of her classmates, she has been reminded in college of what she missed in high school: University officials told her she needed to take remedial math.

'I Could Have Graduated'

The deficiencies that have plagued the D.C. public school system did not go unnoticed at Cardozo. Across the city, principals have waited more than a year on average for urgent repairs to be made. Among them was Ballard, who said he waited two years for the system's maintenance department to install a simple connection so he could update the internet server for the school's computers. It still was not done when he left the school in 2006.

A 2003 audit found mistakes in student transcripts at every high school. At Cardozo, Pedro Peña received a letter from his counselor a month before commencement notifying him that he didn't have enough credits to graduate and that he would have to go to summer school. Peña said he was devastated. He had long dreamed about the day he would walk across the stage in his cap and gown.

But when he showed up to register for summer school, he said, an assistant principal asked why he wasn't at graduation the night before to pick up his diploma. His name was called out, he was told.

"I could have graduated," said Peña, 20. The counselor had been mistaken, but Peña had not been able to straighten out the confusion beforehand.

"Every day I'd go to the counselor and she wouldn't be there," said Peña, who is studying engineering at Montgomery College.

A Fight Every Day

Most days his freshman year, Edwin Andrades pushed past his fear and went to school, focused on learning English and playing soccer in the afternoons with his friends. He was careful to avoid the racial battles and the bullies.

"Every day there were fights," said Andrades, 22. "There were fights inside and outside, fights in the bathroom."

Much of the trouble, students said, was between blacks and Hispanics. The freshman class had 153 black students, 85 Hispanics and five Asians.

Even with all his caution, Andrades was accosted in the most public of places -- the cafeteria. Three black students, he said, pushed him, punched him in the face and stole his wallet. "They were laughing and saying, 'Don't tell nobody. You tell somebody and we'll do something more.' "

Other students and even the security guards, he said, "didn't say nothing. They looked like nothing happened."

Then his car was broken into on campus. His mother, who worked at a restaurant, asked if he wanted to change schools and they moved to Prince George's County, where he enrolled in high school.

The change was dramatic, he said. "They got a lot of security cameras everywhere," he added. "You don't see discrimination."

Teachers of English as a second language were better, said Andrades, who moved with his mother from El Salvador in 1997. "They talk in Spanish and English. They tutored me; they explained."

Still, the improved school environment was not enough to keep him from becoming another dropout. During his junior year, his girlfriend got pregnant and they married. He quit school and took a full-time job as a road striper. He said he has no plans to resume his education and wants to return to El Salvador in five years.

Father Figure

Rafael Rivera, a Guatemalan immigrant who lived largely on his own during his years at Cardozo, said he found the school to be a welcoming place because of a dedicated counselor. Rivera lived with a cousin in the District and bused tables overnight at a Mexican restaurant to support himself. When he arrived, he could neither speak English nor write or read in Spanish.

He said his counselor, Leonel Popol -- originally from Guatemala, too -- stayed after school with him every day, first teaching him to read and write in Spanish and then to communicate in English. Popol invited Rivera to spend weekends and holidays with his family.

"I thought, 'Oh, my God. You have no idea how much you have to go through' " to learn the language and succeed in high school, Popol said recently. "I explained, just take it one day at a time. This can be done. You have to believe it." Hear more from Rafael.

When Rivera contemplated dropping out because he needed to work full-time, Popol gave encouragement and money to help pay the bills, Rivera said. By the 11th grade, Rivera could read and write in both languages; by the 12th grade he had a 2.78 GPA and received a one-year scholarship to UDC.

But when his scholarship money ran out, and he lost his job, he left college. He fell into a depression and attempted suicide, he said. Popol has remained a father figure to Rivera, who is seeing a counselor and looking for work.

Popol "doesn't give up," said Rivera, 21. "I'm feeling myself lucky to find people to do whatever it takes to see me successful."

Diego Mejia, a classmate of Rivera's, is grateful for another Cardozo experience.

For most of his high school years, Mejia was a right guard on the football team and dreamed of an NFL career. But in his senior year, he took a carpentry class and learned about drafting.

Mejia knew about carpentry from helping relatives build houses, but he took the class so he could learn the English names for tools. The students were required to design a house and build a scale model of it. Mejia earned an A-plus.

"You have a gift," Mejia said his teacher told him. "He saw the drawings and said, 'Focus on that.' "

Mejia was intrigued by the thought, and since graduating has been drawing houses in his spare time and putting aside money from his sales job. He plans to enroll in a technical school in December to study architecture.

Determined to Finish

When Anthony Michaux dropped out during junior year, there was no one who could intervene to solve his problems.

He had struggled with his reading, which was around a fifth-grade level, and he had been placed in the school's special education program because of a learning disability. Meredith Cole, who was Michaux's homeroom teacher, said she attributed his low reading level not to his disability but to a lack of proper instruction in D.C. elementary schools.

Then, when he was a sophomore, his older brother Abdul died in his sleep, and Michaux was devastated. "Me and my older brother was close," said Michaux, 20. "I was hurt for a while."

His attendance became erratic, alarming some of his teachers, and the next year he quit altogether. Michaux's school career "went downhill," Cole said. Watch a video about Anthony.

He explored earning a GED while he worked as a cashier at a convenience store, but his mother, Wanda Michaux, convinced him that wasn't good enough. "I told him he couldn't stay in my house without his high school diploma," she said.

And so last year, Michaux tried returning to Cardozo. But school officials refused to take him because of his poor academic record and his age. He decided to fight -- he appealed to the school system's central office -- and won. The school was ordered to re-enroll him because he is entitled under federal law to receive special education services until he turns 22.

This semester, he is carrying a full load with help from a special education teacher -- English, algebra, Spanish and world history -- and he rarely misses class, his teacher said. His plan is to graduate in June 2008 -- three years late and seven years after he started with the Class of 2005.

"I got to be more serious," said Michaux, who wants to attend Clark Atlanta University to study computer technology. "I want to get out."

Researchers Alice Crites and Meg Smith and database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.