Excitement mounted among the four anthropology students as their plane touched down in Mérida, near the northern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. After multiple flights, their destination lay another two hours south in Oxcutzcab, a small agricultural town popular with visitors to the ancient Maya ruins that are scattered across hundreds of kilometers in the Puuc region.

Diana Chavez, a junior, and three fellow CSUDH students would spend four weeks working alongside local excavators to shed greater light on the history of the Yucatec Maya. Their focus? The history of these ancient settlements in an area of the country without access to any natural water supplies—except whatever rainfall the inhabitants could gather and store during the six-month wet season.

Chavez grew up watching Indiana Jones swashbuckle his way across the remains of multiple civilizations, which taught her that archaeology is a valuable pursuit—minus the bullwhip and exploitation. “I’m interested in a more ethical approach,” she says, “that balances museum curatorship with the need for repatriation of artifacts to the cultures that produced them.” She credits two other influences for her interest in archaeology: her father and his love of history; and Ken Seligson, an archaeological anthropologist and associate professor at CSUDH, whose passion for Mesoamerican history helped convince her to transfer from Long Beach City College.

Seligson began the field work program in 2019, so that CSUDH students could participate in valuable field experience and help direct their professional interests. The goal for this trip was to conduct a series of test excavations in the Kaxil Kiuic Biocultural Reserve; specifically, an ancient platform and ball court dating to somewhere between 900 BC and 300 BC.

The students and professor set out to focus their research on the timeline of the settlement at two sites: Cerro Hul and Xanub Chak. But that took a back seat after Seligson’s students, working alongside Yucatec Maya excavators, made an extraordinary discovery that could fundamentally alter the chronology of how and when Maya civilization took root in the Puuc region.

A Groundbreaking Find

Mexican law requires local workers be hired for excavation at archaeological sites. The policy aligns with Chavez’s thoughts about the questionable ethics of Hollywood explorers: that the people whose history is being studied should be the ones directly in contact with their land. After the indigenous excavators remove dirt and debris from the dig site, they hand off what has been uncovered to archaeologists like Seligson and his students, who can then clean up and study what they found. So it was José Chi Xool, one of the Yucatec Maya working with the student team, who first uncovered the surprising artifact, buried beneath centuries of dirt.

Alyssa Guerrero, a senior, says the day of the discovery started like any other. The team was less than a week into their field work, hiking two sweaty kilometers each day through newly cleared jungle track to get to the site. They gathered near the platform dig site at Xanub Chak, as José Chi Xool uncovered pieces of a centuries-old plate—already a valuable find. “And then we heard him say, in Spanish, ‘That looks like a doll.’ ”

Doll or figurine, nothing like it had ever been unearthed this far north. Seligson says similar artifacts were being made in northern Guatemala and western Belize, but archaeologists haven’t discovered any in this region of Mexico. He and the students knew immediately that they had stumbled on an artifact of particular importance. “It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever found in my 14 years of working here, and the students managed to find it on their fourth day of excavation,” Seligson says. “We don’t know for sure yet what to make of it.”

For Guerrero, the moment recalled what CSUDH Professor Jerry Moore said in his ancient civilizations course. Specifically, that the practice of archaeology often amounted to long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of excitement. “Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait that long for the exciting stuff,” Guerrero says.

Uncovering the Maya World

Seligson says the discovery of the figurine was a delightful surprise. “We weren’t there to find artifacts like that. We were there to look at a specific iteration of sociopolitical evolution in the region.”

Since 2010, Seligson has spent four weeks each summer in the Puuc region to examine the chronology of permanent settlement and how the communities that lived there related to larger and better-known Maya centers further south. The 4,500-acre Kaxil Kiuic Reserve, where this dig site is located, is owned by a nonprofit formed at Millsaps College in Mississippi. Millsaps also operates a research lab and guest houses 30 minutes away, where Seligson and his students gained temporary respite from the sweltering summer heat.

Since its establishment, the Kaxil Kiuic Reserve has provided archaeologists with intriguing new details about the ancient Maya communities that once lived in the Puuc region, despite its challenging geology and geography. “There is no surface water at all,” Seligson says. “No streams, no lakes, no rivers, nothing—and it only rains for six months out of the year.”

Permanent settlement required careful resource management systems. To survive, people living there had to develop intricate environmental mechanisms, Seligson says—for example, capturing and storing enough water to last through the long dry season.

Archaeologists have long thought that settlers in the Puuc region arrived in the late Preclassic period from about 300 BC onward. Tomás Gallareta Negrón, a senior archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History, says that recent archaeological evidence suggests a much earlier date.

“We know from the arrangement and type of buildings that we’re finding that these communities were much larger and more sophisticated than we once thought,” says Negrón, who has worked at such important Maya sites as Cobá, Uxmal, Chichen Itzá, and Isla Cerritos. “We also know that they arrived much earlier than previously thought, probably around 900-1000 BCE.”

The discovery of the figurine suggests that Puuc Maya communities had ties with larger cultural centers to the south. “The discovery of the figurine pushes back on the idea that the region was a cultural backwater until the South started to collapse and people moved North,” Seligson says. “It tells us that there was a parallel cultural trajectory in the North.”

Tools of the Trade

Jose Quintero, a senior anthropology major with a concentration in archaeology, says getting such valuable field work experience brought the Puuc Maya community to life. “Classroom archaeology is one thing, but I’m learning that archaeologists want to be out in the world and doing archaeology,” he says.

Quintero worked with Seligson to create LiDAR mapping of the areas the team wanted to explore during this field work season. He also used GPS readings to measure and orient the outlines of structures revealed by LiDAR. “You really get the sense that you’re sort of seeing what the people who lived here thousands of years ago saw,” he says.

Reese Santonil came to archaeology by way of computer science. The senior anthropology major spent part of the field work season creating 3D renderings of artifacts excavated and catalogued in the Kaxil Kiuic Reserve, including some of the new ceramic fragments the CSUDH team uncovered.

The process involves setting the artifact on a white backdrop and photographing it from all different angles. “To get the finished rendering, I use software that stitches the images together to create a 3D model,” Santonil says. The images can be used to create a virtual catalogue that students and other researchers around the world can access when they can’t visit Kaxil Kiuic in person.

Chavez is pursuing an individual research project, called Star Sanctuaries and Platforms, which looks at the spatial orientation of Ma-ya structures and whether that might correlate to religious or ritual use. The project combines archaeology, culture, and religion, and Chavez drew inspiration from her Honduran grandmother—a curandero, or traditional healer. “She was very syncretic about religion, combining traditional Catholic elements with older folk traditions. That really prompted my interest in cultural anthropology.”

Past and Present

Seligson hopes the field work experience gives his students a broader perspective on the people that lived in the Puuc region thousands of years ago, and the ones that still do. “One of the things driving my own research is the need to help people understand that the Maya culture overall is not a culture of the past,” he says. “There are still seven million Maya people alive and well today.”

There’s still a lot about the Puuc Maya that remains unknown, says Seligson. “It’s like working on a jigsaw puzzle without having the cover of the box to know if you’ve got it right.” He says the 2024 field work season will focus on broader excavations at the Xanub Chak site where the figurine was discovered, and supported by a new three-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve clearly confirmed that the site is Middle Preclassic, dating from between 900 BCE and 350 BCE,” says Seligson. “Now, we want to learn more about the construction history of some of the buildings. Why did the people in this community not build on top of the platform and ball courts when they did so at other sites from the same period?”

A lot more work remains to be done, says Seligson, who plans to publish a paper this year with his students on the discovery of the figurine. “We have a lot of broader questions we want answers to, and that will require a lot more excavation. We’re really just at the start of it.”

Enlightening LiDAR

Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, is a remote sensing method that uses a pulsed laser to map the contours of the Earth’s surface. Data is gathered by an instrument attached to a low-flying aircraft that emits 150,000 laser pulses every second.

LiDAR helps researchers see beneath the thick canopy. Just like sunlight through leaves, a few laser pulses reach the ground every square foot. Maps can then be generated by digitally removing the forest canopy to reveal the contours of physical structures on the ground beneath.

This technology saves time and is much less invasive than older practices says Seligson. “For an area the size of two kilometers, it could take as many as five or 10 years of walking back and forth on the forest floor to gather enough data for a map. It would also require cutting back a lot of the forest.”

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Darkness falls over the looming peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and a group of CSUDH students huddle around a roaring campfire. It’s the middle of October, and the temperature in the Owens Valley dips sharply when the sun goes down.

George Wing smiles as the students’ laughter echoes across the campground. He’s been bringing students to Bishop, Calif., for nearly a decade, to participate in an intramural class unlike any other at the university: fly fishing.

Most of the students who sign up have no prior experience fishing or camping, and learning the skills to enjoy the outdoors is as much a focus of the class as catching fish. “It’s been life-changing for a lot of them,” says Wing, turning toward the ring of students around the campfire. “I get texts and photos from former students all the time. Now they’re going camping and fishing with their own children.”

Fishing in Urban Los Angeles

Wing arrived at CSUDH in 1988 as head coach of the baseball team, later joining the faculty of the Kinesiology Department as a lecturer in 2006, and director of Intramural Sports in 2011. Three years later, Wing and department chair Michael Ernst came up with the idea for the fly-fishing class.

The curriculum is informal but rigorous. Students learn their way around a fly rod and the necessary accessories—fly lines, leaders, tippets. They discover the subtle art of tying flies and securing them to their lines. Finally, they practice the gentle, whip-like cast that, if done correctly, drops the fly lightly on the surface of the water.

A portion of each class is set aside for students to practice their casting at the university swimming pool. “Casting is one of the hardest things for me to learn,” says Savannah Foster, a junior design major at CSUDH who is taking the class for a second time. “When you’re near a river, there are trees that can snag your line. It won’t be completely flat like the pool.”

Learning the proper uses of a back cast or a roll cast is only part of the difficulty, Foster adds. “I can never remember how to tie the various knots. I always need help. I learn the knots, and then I forget them. I’m hoping the lessons will eventually stick.”

Each semester, the class packs up their camping equipment (funded by the Associated Students, Inc. through the Instructionally Related Activities fee) and piles into a van headed north. Soon, they’ll find out if their casting technique and hand-tied flies are good enough to fool the rainbow trout populating the region’s rivers and streams, and if nights under the starry skies are everything Wing promised they’d be.

Fellowship of the Fly

It’s rarely just Wing alone with his class on these trips. Daniel Garcia completed a post-baccalaureate certification in the Clinical Lab Science program at CSUDH in 2019. He took Wing’s class twice as a student and has continued to join field trips as a mentor to new students ever since. “I picked up fly fishing pretty quickly, and maybe Coach Wing recognized my passion for it,” he said.

Then there’s Thom Glonchak, a retired firefighter who met Wing when their sons played on the same youth baseball team. They have coached together, and now they share a passion for fly fishing, which Glonchak brings to the field trips as well. “I like to figure out where the fish are hiding or holding in the stream or river,” he says. “Then you have to figure out which fly to use and what will entice them to bite.”

It was on the lower Owens River a year ago that Glonchak met Mark Williams, a transportation and logistics professional who lives in Bishop and devotes any spare time he has to fly fishing. Williams later met Wing, and since then has fished alongside students each semester when they come to Bishop.

“George and these kids really inspired me to give back what was given to me,” says Williams, who took a previous class to see ancient petroglyphs in Chidago Canyon just north of Bishop. These rock art sites were created thousands of years ago by ancestors of the Paiute-Shoshone peoples.

“There’s so much to learn out here,” says Williams. “There were people here long before me, and there’ll be people here long after I’m gone. The lessons that these opportunities give are priceless.”

It’s not just petroglyphs and campsites on these trips. Located 45 minutes south on Highway 395, the Manzanar National Historic Site is a potent reminder not only of the forcible relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II but of a longer tradition of displacement that saw the removal of Owens Valley Paiute settlements by ranchers in the late 19th century. It’s also a fixture on every student trip to Bishop.

Joshua Barragan, a senior environmental studies major, says Manzanar provides an important opportunity to learn the history and culture of the areas where they fish. “There’s so many stories that are told at Manzanar, and so many records of peoples’ lives,” he says. “The last time we came, we actually met a former internee during our tour who shared some of his personal memories of life at the camp.”

Connecting People, Places, and Things

Wing turned 70 this year and says he’s beginning to think about retirement. For now, he plans to continue the class that has meant so much to so many students. “Coach Wing’s approach to teaching is really gentle,” says Foster, who took the course the first time to ease back into her studies after taking a break. “It’s the opposite of an academic course. He’s just like, ‘This is what I do, this is why I love it, and I want to share it with you.’ It was just such a welcoming experience coming back from a year off.”

As the fire begins to sputter at the Bishop campground, students start preparing for bed. Morning comes early, and they have a full itinerary. A few of them celebrated their first catch earlier in the day and are excited for more. Others haven’t been as fortunate. In the end, the results don’t always seem as important than the process. “Fly fishing connects you to the natural world, and it creates bonds between people,” says Wing. “In Owens Valley, it also connects you to those who have fished these waters for thousands of years. Now we’ve all become part of the long history of this place.”

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A lot of what makes higher education at CSUDH special happens outside the traditional four walls of the classroom. Experiential and co-curricular learning are part of the strategic mission of the university—embedded deeply in the values we promote as an institution and that we seek to instill in our students.

Just in the last several months, our Toros have evaluated child development strategies in southern Italy, supported occupational therapy services in an area of central Bulgaria with few institutional resources, visited the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and uncovered new artifacts of global significance in the jungles of eastern Mexico that fill critical gaps in our understanding of Mayan culture.

Closer to home, CSUDH students have explored the stunning natural beauty of the Sierra Nevadas in Bishop, Calif. during an annual flyfishing trip. Along the way, they’ve learned about land and water conservation, explored the history of the indigenous population of the Owens Valley region, and visited the Manzanar National Historic Site, where thousands of Japanese Americans were interned during World War II.  

“The idea behind transformation education is that your student experience changes you,” says Rob Goodwin, founder of the travel company Stone & Compass. A graduate of CSUDH, Goodwin founded the company in 2011 as a full-service travel agency but also as a mechanism to give students from across the country a chance to expand their educational horizons.

He estimates that about 1,000 CSUDH students have participated in his study abroad programs in the last 13 years. “We run these programs for CSUDH at a deep discount by raising funds in other areas to offset the costs,” says Goodwin. “My professors at CSUDH believed in my potential, even though I had a pretty indifferent educational background. They helped me believe in myself, so it’s my way of giving back.”  

The company operates as a fully vested nonprofit organization that also raises funding for projects that support communities in need throughout the world. “Our mission is pretty simple—take a trip and change a life.”

Goodwin says his study abroad programs have made a real impact in the lives of many students. “We gauge this by what students do when they get back home,” he says. “I’ve seen some kids change their whole career path. The programs we offer help students gain a deep awareness about the world and a stronger connection to it.”

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Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Jessica Pandya moved to California soon after graduating from the University of Chicago. She earned her multiple-subject teaching credential from the New College of California and started teaching kindergarten in the San Francisco Unified School District.

Wanting to learn more about how kids learn, she went on to attain a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Education in Language, Literacy & Culture from UC Berkeley. Pandya decided to use her knowledge to become a teacher educator, passing on what she learned from her studies and years of classroom experience.

She moved to Southern California and spent 16 years as a professor, including six years as the Liberal Studies Department chair at Cal State Long Beach. Eventually, she says, “I wanted to become one of the people who was making decisions. When the dean position opened up at CSUDH, the vision and mission of the College of Education spoke to me. This is the place I really wanted to work.” Pandya began her role as Dean of the College of Education in 2021.

The College of Education’s mission is centered on equity and social justice. How does the college prepare its students to be advocates for social change?  

Primarily, that work is accomplished by our great faculty in the content of their courses. If you look at the curriculum from Liberal Studies all the way through to our brand new doctorate, you can see it in what things are called, the framing of assignments, and the way syllabi look. We have a diverse faculty who’s really interested in these issues. That’s why they’re here.

The social justice pieces are there in the kinds of programs we offer. We know that people in our community want these things. We’re at the forefront of issues like inclusion—we have a dual language certificate and a bilingual authorization program in Spanish, with those classes taught in Spanish. We’re building a Korean bilingual authorization, too. In the COE, there’s a huge focus on inclusion, disability justice, and disability rights, as well.

A lot of people don’t know what else the College of Education does besides teacher training. What are some other areas that the COE is responsible for?

Half our students are Liberal Studies majors and most of them will enter into one of our credential programs to become teachers, so it’s understandable that many people don’t know what else we do. But many of those students will then go on to get their master’s in education in Curriculum & Instruction, Dual Language Learning, Special Education, or School & College Counseling.

Eventually, some of those alumni come back to CSUDH to get their administrative credentials—after teaching for a while, they want to become school leaders or principals. So they’ll return for their administrative services credential and an MA in School Leadership, which is one of our largest graduate programs, not only in the COE but in the university.

We’ve got a great School and College Counseling MS program, which also offers a Pupil Personnel Services credential and a child and welfare authorization, which is offered in very few universities. Those are for people who want to be high school or college counselors and advisors.

We have programs in special education, dual language learning, and curriculum instruction as well, which are pretty much for frontline teachers. Most of the students in those programs are actively teaching. And starting in May 2024, we will have our first cohort of Educational Doctorate students in our Educational Leadership for Justice Doctoral program.

We started the Academic Research and Evaluation Center last year, and several partners in the community and the wider university are already taking advantage of the Center’s program and grant assessment services. And, of course, we offer several programs through the College of Continuing and Professional Education, like the Community College Teaching Certificate and the Assistive Technology Certificate.

California and the nation are facing a severe teacher shortage. Why do you think young people should consider entering the profession?  

As a classroom teacher, you get to interact with 30 different kids every day who look up to you and want to learn with you. It’s a profession in which you grow all the time, because you’re never doing the same thing twice. You might do the same lesson with your first graders one year, then the next year do it again and it goes very differently. You’re always learning, you’re always adapting. For folks who like to be active learners, going to a classroom and trying to engage a room full of learners all at once is pretty great.

There’s a lot of talk about how teachers change lives, and that is certainly true. If you ask most people, “Who was your favorite teacher?” they have very specific memories and reasons, like a teacher who believed in them. The teacher who saw that they needed this particular inspiration and gave it to them, or the teacher who inspired them to ask questions, or the teacher who inspired them to become who they are now. You actually change lives all the time as a teacher.

There are also some practical reasons people like teaching. You get your summers off, so you have time to regroup. Many teachers do professional development in the summer, while others do different things—relax, take vacations, do a variety of fun activities.

It’s a pretty great job. There are great benefits. Also, there are lots of jobs in the areas where our students come from. So if you want to teach in special education, there are jobs for you. If you want to support kids with mild or extensive support needs, you can get a job. As soon as you finish your credential, you’ll likely be hired.

If you can speak Spanish and teach in Spanish, you’re going to get hired. If you are interested in becoming a math teacher and get your credential, you’ll be hired. These are high-need areas. I think sometimes people go to college and think, “What am I going to do with this degree?” You know what you can do with your teaching credential, because you can get a job very quickly.

How does the College of Education support aspiring teachers and other students? 

We support our students in lots of different ways. We support them through our faculty teaching, in what we teach, how we teach, and the availability of faculty, who are always willing to guide and support students. We support them in our Student Success Center, which advises undergraduates on their progress toward a credential. We support them in graduate programs with excellent advisors.

We also support them financially. We give out a fair number of scholarships. This coming year, we’ll have even more to give, thanks to the generous Ballmer Group gift (see next page). That will give us another $17 million in scholarships to give away over the next six years. That’s mostly going towards students entering the preschool-third grade credential that we are building to open in Spring 2025, but that means that the scholarship dollars we have for other degrees will stay and hopefully grow as donors see the impact we’re having.

We host a variety of professional development activities like speakers’ series and workshops, and this semester we started study halls in our interior courtyard. We have a team of clinical practice faculty—once students get into student teaching, the faculty consult with them, place them in schools, and help with serious problems they might encounter.

We also have several faculty members whose jobs aren’t to teach, but instead are to support our students’ clinical practice, which is a huge piece of most of our programs.

We keep our curriculum very current, and constantly assess what we’re doing by asking ourselves: Are we doing a good job? Are we meeting our standards? Are our degrees valuable? We maintain really good relationships with our local school district partners, who help us keep things aimed in the right direction.

Do you get a lot of feedback from local school districts on what they need going forward?

We invite our district partners to campus once a semester, look at data with them, then have listening sessions. We ask them what kinds of students do they want to hire, what’s going on with clinical practice, what do they need from us? What professional development can we provide? Where are your shortages? All those conversations inform the direction of our college. We had over 20 partners at our last meeting this fall.

What does the future hold for the College of Education? 

We’re hiring six tenure-track faculty this year, which is a lot for us, and have recently hired six new staff positions. So we’re growing. We hope to grow all of our programs. But we need to build our college faculty and staff first, because we are at capacity in almost all of our programs.

We’ll continue to see increased grant activity, and we’re going to be working on all of our financial processes and improving them. We’re also going to be intensely involved in bilingual education—we’ve already got a lot of Spanish language courses, and we’re planning to add some Korean bilingual courses, too.

We’ll continue to work on expanding technology access from a social justice perspective and on developing truly inclusive education through work in our Snap, Inc. Institute for Technology and Education.

What would you like Toro students to know about the college that they may not know?  

I’d like students to know that if you like learning, you might want to consider being a teacher.

And if you didn’t like learning, you might also want to consider becoming a teacher, because you could do a better job. I mean, you can become the teacher you wish you had! There’s a lot to do in education and we are an open place for folks to come learn.

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Public service runs deep for Edgar Mejia-Alezano, president and CEO of Associated Students, Inc. at California State University, Dominguez Hills. A proud son of Guatemala, he descends from two civic leaders of the small town of Retalhuleu, an agricultural hub in the southwest corner of the country, where he was born in 2002.

“It felt like a call to action when I was given the opportunity to serve in ASI,” says Alezano, who became Director of Student Services in 2021 before he has elected as Executive Vice President the following year. “My grandfather and his father were mayors in my hometown and fought hard to improve access to schooling for those who could least afford it.”

Life in Retalhuleu was hard for young Alezano. His parents emigrated to the United States by the time he was two. He grew up with his grandparents in a house that had no running water and only occasional electricity.

It’s hard for him in hindsight not to think of it as a journey home when he arrived in the United States at the age of four, concealed in the cargo hold of a passenger bus. He spent hours nestled among suitcases, with only water and a few snacks.

“I was very young, and I don’t remember every detail, but I know that I was scared and excited,” Alezano says. “My grandfather was taking me to a place where my dreams could come true, where my family was waiting for me, where I could be whatever I wanted to be.”

His parents and a few other family members met them at Union Station. “I remember that I gave everyone a big hug. Then I got to my dad,” Alezano says. “I was so young when he left, and I had no real memory of him as my dad, but I threw myself at him and didn’t let go.”

In the excitement of his arrival, he forgot his suitcase on the bus. His great-grandmother had packed it full of family photographs. “I had no idea the value of what I was carrying,” he recalls. “It was a record of my life, a life that my parents had missed, and it was gone forever.”

In the years since, artifacts have become important to Alezano. He pulls a worn paperback from a bookshelf. “My grandfather gave me this after we arrived in America. It used to belong to his father,” he says. “It’s a sort of guide to the qualities that a good man should have. It represents all the hopes he had for me.”

Alezano played football at Crenshaw High School, helping the Cougars win a state championship in 2017. During his senior year, he toured CSUDH. It was a representative of ASI that ultimately inspired him to become a Toro. “He talked about campus as a welcoming community and a place that I could call home.”

CSUDH proved to be a perfect fit. “When I say that CSUDH is where dreams come true, it’s been the literal truth for me,” he says. “You are seen here, no matter where you come from or how you got here, and you have opportunities that you could never have imagined.”

Alezano successfully ran for president in 2023 on a platform of providing more assistance to students from underrepresented communities. Key priorities have included making menstrual hygiene products freely available to any students who need them, as well as advocating for increased funding to extend students opportunities and resources for Theater Arts and Dance, Music, and Intramural programs. He’s also co-chair of the Financial Aid and Affordability Task Force that was convened late last year, to help mitigate the impact of tuition increases on students struggling to afford higher education.

A family tragedy in 2022 nearly convinced him to leave ASI. Two of the most important people in his life—his great-grandmother and his aunt—passed away in the space of 36 hours. For the next few months, he struggled to focus on school and even submitted a letter of resignation from ASI to then-President Obioha “Obi” Ogbonna. Fortunately, he says, Ogbonna talked him into staying. “He told me not to make a life-changing decision while I was grieving.”

Alezano has always worn the mantle of leadership lightly. His role, he says, is to provide the support and direction that so many others gave to him. “I’ve never tried to hide my background,” he says. “When I talk to students and their parents, I see that they recognize my story because it’s their story, too.”

Brought up in the Christian faith, Alezano says he’s found strength to overcome the challenges he’s faced from a verse in the Gospel of John. In the 13th verse of chapter 7, Jesus tells his disciples they don’t yet know what he’s doing but that they will understand later. “I don’t always know why things happen in life, especially the hard things, but that’s not a reason to give up,” 
he says.

In the worn paperback book his grandfather gave him, Alezano keeps a small sheaf of handwritten letters. “He would write to me from Guatemala and remind me to work hard.” The book and letters help him stay connected with his grandfather, who died in 2016.

You are seen here, no matter where you come from or how you got here, and you have opportunities that you could 
never have imagined.”

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