Graduation 2004: Against the odds

In the next few weeks, some 34,600 Utah high school seniors will don caps and gowns and parade across stages around the state to receive their diplomas.

Among them are young people — and some not so young — who have overcome daunting, even seemingly insurmountable, obstacles to earn their high school diploma.

In today's Deseret Morning News, we profile several of those graduates.

---

Off the streets and on road to success

Tiffany Erickson

Deseret Morning News

When Theresa Chase, 38, turns her tassel this June, it will represent more than passing a series of classes. It will mean she has been drug free for five years. It will mean she reached a goal that has evaded her for decades. And it will mean she picked herself up off the street, traveled the rough road back to the land of the living and not only survived but succeeded.

Moving to Sandy from Ohio when she was 10 marked the end of Chase's happy childhood. Adopted and of Eastern Indian and Native American descent, she was dark, different.

Chase's chestnut hair, coffee-brown eyes and olive skin seemed to invite harassment, racial slurs and abuse at school and at church, despite the fact that her father was a bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"They ripped my clothes, pulled my hair and called me horrible names," said Chase.

School stopped being a priority, and at 17 she was pregnant and flunking.

She finally had a talk with her mom about a friend who had gotten pregnant and didn't know what to do. Her mother told Chase that if she herself ever got pregnant she would be kicked out.

"The next day when my mom dropped me off at school, I walked in the front doors of Valley High and walked out the back," said Chase. "I didn't go too far, though — downtown Salt Lake."

She lived in a home for expectant teen mothers until a few months after her son was born. But a year later she had to give him up because she couldn't take care of him.

She started using heroin and cocaine and lost her job. Homeless, jobless and penniless, she started sleeping wherever she could, and her main focus was her next fix.