Leonard Martinez. Student Body President, Katella High School : In Rejection, Student Finds Inspiration

Leonard Martinez says he thanked a baseball coach at Katella High School last year for telling him he didn’t have what it took to make the team.

That judgment drove the soft-spoken 16-year-old to something he might not have thought possible without those harsh words--to be elected senior class president. At Katella High in Anaheim, no other Latino student has won that position or any other spot in student government.

“That really stuck with me,” Martinez said of the coach’s words. “Then this election came up and I never had the grades or the confidence to do it, but I got a petition with about 300 signatures, and they only needed 100.”

He befriended Latinos at school who were never a part of student elections. One of them, Carlos Quinones, who Martinez describes as “an artist, a cholo and really smart,” became his campaign manager.

The campaign became difficult when one of his speeches came into question.

“My opening statement was, ‘Fellow students, thank you for being here. Your presence here is proof that you do give a shoot about your future,’ ” he said. But the word shoot was too strong for one teacher who complained, he said.

The intensity of the campaign increased after none of the candidates won a majority of votes in the first election, resulting in a runoff, Principal Jerry Glenn said. When the runoff resulted in a tie, Martinez and his friends suspected school officials were conspiring against him--an allegation denied by Glenn.

“They told me they were going to have another election, and people were really mad. They wanted to have a walkout and start riots,” Martinez said.

On the advice of his mother, Kathy Jurado, an instructor with the Orange County Educational Partnership Program, Martinez and his friends kept plugging away without losing control.

He and some friends kept a vigil outside the principal’s office as the ballots were counted. His mother and other supporters waited outside.

Then word came that her son had won.

“It blew my mind, all these kids, black, white, brown, said, ‘Leonard, thank God you hung in there,’ ” Jurado said.

Martinez said his inspiration came from his mother, who grew up in the gangs in Santa Ana and had him, her first child, at age 15.

“He said, ‘Mom, if it had been possible in your day, you would have been the senior class president. I did it for you.’ He started crying and then I started crying,” Jurado said. “It was just like when my mom cried when I got a job that paid just as well as a man’s because it was something she couldn’t do in her day.”

Asked about his ambitions beyond high school, he said thoughtfully and deliberately, “I want to be a civil rights attorney and then the president of the United States. And I’ll do it.”

Martinez is now making plans for his senior year. He wants “to put Hispanics on the ladder . . . not just sitting in the corner of the cafeteria eating the leftovers instead of the main course.”