Central High School graduates are united in their quest for college degrees
By JOE ROBERTSON
The Kansas City Star
The three Central High School graduates admit they don’t have an appropriate fist-pumping, hand-slapping ritual.
What they do have is a pact.
Kaleig Mohammad, DeAndre Watson and Ronald Chaney will head off to the same university this fall.
They will live in the same dorm suite.
And through calculus, literature, science, parties and girls, they’re going to make sure they all come out on the other side with college degrees.
“We’re going to cover each other,” Chaney said. “We’re going to keep levelheaded.”
If the pact holds, they’ll move upward from a high school where fewer than half the graduates go on to any college or technical institute and only one in five goes to a four-year university.
Their friendship has brought them far.
Mohammad couldn’t be sure where he and his mother and two sisters would be living or whether they’d have a car, let alone what choices he’d have for schools.
Watson had figured himself a loner, resolved to recover from middle-school failures however he could on his own.
Chaney worries that all three of them are due a harsh awakening as they take their inner-city high school education off to Lindenwood University, a four-year liberal arts school in St. Charles, Mo.
They put their fists together while posing for a photographer and consider it a moment.
“We look like the Power Rangers,” one of them said, and they break up laughing.
•••
Ask them how the friendship started and they laugh.
“I killed him in chess,” Chaney said, pointing at a head-shaking Mohammad.
“Checkmate in three moves.”
The after-school chess club had been Chaney’s haven at the start of his freshman year. There, whether freshmen or upperclassmen, “everyone was equal,” he said. “It was a peaceful environment.”
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Hope they’ll stay as friends for the rest of their lives.