The Best Kind of Statistics

Most 14-year-old girls were probably giggling about boys or attacking algebra problems when Becky McGraw gave birth to her son 10 years ago.

But the single mother, now 24, was indistinguishable from her peers Saturday as she beamed with accomplishment in a cap and gown at Cal State Fullerton’s 41st commencement ceremony.

The day was more than a rite of passage for McGraw, who has already seen her share of what the “real world” has to offer.

It was proof that troubled children who get shuttled around the foster-care system can avoid the cycle of poverty and trouble they so often face.

“I didn’t want to be a statistic,” said McGraw. “And I knew having my son early, I was kind of set up to go bad. Not only did I have a child at 14, but I was in the system, and I was going to end up poor and in a trailer park somewhere.”

Instead, McGraw and another student, Danielle Dunlap, are the first graduates of Fullerton’s Guardian Scholars program, which offers financial and emotional support to undergraduates who have left the foster care system.

The two joined Guardian Scholars as junior transfers when the university and the Orangewood Children’s Foundation started the program two years ago. It is believed to be the only one of its kind in the state.

About 250 youths turning 18 are emancipated from the county’s foster-care system every year, said Orangewood executive director Gene Howard, and most don’t have any support during the rough transition to the rhythms of college academics and dorm life.

Guardian Scholars fills this void with peer and faculty mentoring, counseling, job opportunities and financial assistance. It serves 14 students and is expected to expand to about 50.

Dunlap, who is 22, keeps quiet about her past out of respect for her two older sisters, who want their family history to remain private.

She will say that she often found herself kicked out of the Huntington Beach home where she lived with her mother and her mother’s husband. Told to pack up and leave at 17, she moved in with a boyfriend’s family while attending Orange Coast College.

But a breakup with that boyfriend and a planned transfer to Cal State Fullerton left Dunlap with mounting expenses and no place to live.

Even though Dunlap had not been part of the foster care system, her estrangement with her mother made her eligible for Guardian Scholars.

“I had a hard time adjusting at Fullerton, and what helped more than anything was knowing there were people I could talk to on staff,” Dunlap said. “Everything in my life had just changed and the emotional stuff was really hard for me.”

Dunlap won’t officially earn her degree in business until she finishes two summer courses, but she was permitted to take part in Saturday’s ceremony.

McGraw, who received her degree in communications, begins a two-year management training program with the Perrier Group in a few weeks.

Her new life is a far cry from her recent past, when she worked in a rat costume at Chuck E. Cheese for $5 an hour while her son, Danny, stayed with his paternal grandparents.

Now, she and her son, a bright, active fourth-grader, live in a tidy one-bedroom Fullerton apartment filled with family photos. McGraw sleeps on the couch in the living room, where she did her studying, while Danny gets the bedroom to himself. A calendar on the dining table keeps track of their many activities: Mom’s classes and tests and Danny’s Cub Scout meetings and team practices.

Things could have been very different for McGraw, a petite, slender woman whose toe ring and purple nail polish are the only clues to her real age. But she steered her course with a strong sense that education matters and that she couldn’t give in to negative expectations.

Still, it took several painful transitions before McGraw landed at Cal State Fullerton.

For the first few years after Danny’s birth, the two lived with McGraw’s mother in Torrance.

As McGraw describes it, she fell in with the wrong crowd and started getting into trouble. Her mother saw it as a rebellion against her new responsibilities.

“When she had the baby, it was kind of like she lost her childhood,” McGraw’s mother, Margaret, said. “She felt kind of trapped and wondered what happened to her youth and it was: ‘I’m just a kid and I’m going to be a kid.’ ”

By the time McGraw was 17, things had reached a breaking point with her family, and she left her mother’s home. She and Danny moved into the Florence Crittenton residential treatment center in Fullerton and she finished high school.

Living at the home “was like that refuge I needed from my own bad decisions and everything else,” McGraw said. “That period of time was a good way to clear my head and realize hanging around the wrong people isn’t good for me and for my family relationships.”

But when she turned 18, McGraw had no choice but to leave the Crittenton home. Her relationship with her mother had not been reconciled yet, so she couldn’t return to Torrance. She said she was so scared about venturing out on her own that she began hoarding toilet paper from Crittenton to take to her new apartment.

McGraw continued working at Chuck E. Cheese, where she had started while still in foster care. Danny stayed with his paternal grandparents in Artesia during the week, coming back to his mother for the weekends and her days off.

After a year of toiling as a rat and receiving a $1-an-hour raise and a promotion, a bad day at work finally sent McGraw over the edge in the spring of 1994.

“I thought, ‘What am I doing with my future?’ This job wasn’t going to support me and my son and help me save money so I can some day send him to college,” McGraw said. “I literally walked out of Chuck E. Cheese [that day]. I clocked out and left, and never went back.”

McGraw used the summer months to clear her head, and in the fall, she took her first tentative steps toward getting a college education.

She signed up for classes at Fullerton College at the same time that Danny began preschool. In the spring of 1998, she transferred to Cal State Fullerton with a $6,000 scholarship from the Orangewood Foundation.

McGraw had made it to a four-year university on her own. But when she was offered the extra help through the Guardian Scholars program in the fall of 1998, it lifted a financial and emotional load.

Guardian Scholars “gave me that push up the hill I needed,” McGraw said. “It alleviated some of the worries. I probably would’ve found some way to work it out, but I saw so many loans in my future.”

The teachers and counselors who have worked with McGraw are more impressed with her academic accomplishments and volunteer work than with what she overcame getting to them.

“She is one of the best students I’ve had the privilege to teach,” said Norman R. Nader, an emeritus professor of communications who taught two of McGraw’s public relations courses. “She’s the type of student who makes it very rewarding to teach.”

McGraw also has been active with the Orangewood Foundation, mentoring foster children, and with Crittenton Services for Children and Families, where she was voted a member of the board of directors a year ago.

“She’s making a tremendous contribution to the board,” said Joyce Capelle, Crittenton’s executive director. “She’s really a remarkable woman.”