First lady honors local student's request

Eighteen-year-old Jasmine Williams is not one to be easily intimidated. She grew up in Sursum Coda, a tough Ward 6 neighborhood known for gangs and drugs. She had seen her classmates die from violence and completed her homework at a dimly lit table.But, in August last hear, Jasmine entered the senior year at a school where almost 100 percent of graduates go to college, the Washington Mathematics, Science and Technology Public Charter School at 1920 Bladensburg Road, NE.

She had grown to believe that the most difficult challenges in her life did not lie in the present, but the future. And she wanted a pep talk from the person she believed could understand the struggles she and 98 fellow classmates at WMST were going through - First Lady Michelle Obama.

So, in December 2008, she thought nothing of inviting Mrs. Obama to be the graduation speaker at WMST.

"She has such great inner strength that it drew me to her," Jasmine of Mrs. Obama. "I wanted to see if I could get her to speak at our graduation. I wanted to meet her."

But Jasmine also figured that wanting the First Lady to speak at graduation was a dream thousands of other students across the nation shared.

"But there is always a chance," she thought to herself. "Just like playing the lottery. Even though your chances of winning are like a million to one, if you don't play, you have no chance. So I was like, 'sure, write the letter so we'll have a chance'."

At WMST, Jasmine had relied on teachers for guidance in her academic and personal struggles. But this time she took the letter to Principal Mark Holbrook for guidance.

"Jasmine came to me on a Friday in December and asked if we had a commencement speaker yet," said Principal Holbrook. "I told her I had someone in mind, Dr. William R. Harvey, legendary president of Hampton University."

Jasmine asked Holbrook to invite Mrs. Obama instead. He sent the letter off that Friday. To his surprise, Mrs. Obama's office called him that following Monday.

"I was like, 'No, don't play with me'!" Holbrook said, relishing the moment the White House called. "But they simply said they had received the letter and would make a decision."

Jasmine's appeal to Mrs. Obama was direct. "Where we come from, being a young minority means we have little chance to succeed," Jasmine wrote.

Last year only 57.6% of the students in the DC Public school system graduated, the remainder became a dropout casualty.

"On June first 2009, we will stop being kids who grew up in the city of Washington, DC. We will become adults that will be faced with some of the hardest challenges since 1932," she told the First Lady. "The world already has a predetermined thought that our generation is full of criminals and concubines. Although this may be true about some of those from our generation, there are still a lot of us who live above the influence and strive to be our best."

The letter touched Mrs. Obama's heart. She accepted Jasmine's invitation. On June 3, she addressed the WMST class of 2009 in Cramton Auditorium at Howard University.

She urged the students to push aside their fears and ignore skeptics. She told the class that three was a time in her life when she, too, felt unsure of the world she was about to step into. There were people sowing seeds of doubt in her head, Mrs. Obama, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, told the graduating seniors.

"When I was admitted into Princeton, they told me I shouldn't go to a school so far away from home because I would have a hard time making friends," she recounted. "I would feel out of place and I wouldn't make it through."

But she overlooked and overcame those naysayers. She asked Jasmine and the rest of the class of 2009 to do the same. "With hard work, confidence and faith, you can achieve anything you can set your minds to," she extolled the class. "That's for sure.