Tonet McDowell

Tonet McDowell graduated from Mother Seton Academy in Baltimore in 2000 as the class valedictorian. She attended Mercy High School in Baltimore and continued to participate in Mother Seton’s Graduate Support Program where she received additional support, mentoring and guidance through high school. She was thrilled to receive a Phillips Memorial Trust Scholarship for $10,000/year for four years to allow her to attend St. John’s University as a college freshman in Fall, 2004.

Tonet McDowell, a 2000 graduate of Mother Seton Academy, begins her freshman year at St. John's in fall, 2004.

If a person simply looked at me, he/she would just see a young, African-American, Catholic-high-school student, who travels back and forth to school on the bus. No one would notice the struggle, the tears, and even anger that sometimes made me wish that I was not alive. What I have gone through and what I have experienced is not your everyday teenage crisis.

What do you do when your mother tells you at age eleven that she is on drugs? How do you handle finding out later on that your step-father, the only true father figure you have known since age eight, is on drugs, too? Well, that is what happened to me seven years ago when I was in the fifth grade. Living with my parents throughout their addictions has not been easy, but if it had not happened, I do not know if I would be as motivated as I am now to succeed in life.

In addition to gaining insight from my parents’ battle with drugs, I have also gained motivation to stay on the right path from my mother’s experience with being a teenage parent. She had me when she was almost twenty years old. Unable to finish her college education (which she had barely just begun) she has not been able to provide for me and herself as well as she could have had she earned a college degree.

Not only has my mother’s drug addiction and teenage pregnancy influenced me, but her ability to “make it through the storm” and get over her addiction has as well. She will be drug-free for a year this July, and she’s proven to me that anything is possible if you believe it. Also, nothing lasts forever. What started out bad in the beginning can lead to something positive. If she can experience so many undesirable events in the short span of her life and make it through them, then I can have the determination to avoid all of those things, continue to do the right thing, and successfully complete college.

To see my parents go through something so hard to overcome, to live in a housing project half of my life, and to wonder every other month whether I would be able to continue my private school education is a struggle I have had to deal with since the sixth grade, which is when I began attending Catholic school.

Now I am in the twelfth grade, and I have managed to remain in Mercy High School, a Catholic/private school in Baltimore. I know you are probably thinking, “How?” My parents are on drugs, we live in a poor neighborhood, and we do not have much money. How can my family afford to send me to a private school? Honestly, they cannot. Motivation, good grades, and financial aid have kept me there. Although school has been my personal top priority since day one, life situations have made my determination and dedication to learning even greater. Even when life and schoolwork seems to be overwhelming and too much to deal with, I push myself to go on. At this point, my education is all I have to get ahead in life. There is nothing that can get in my way to stop me from getting where I to want to be: a successful and educated woman who is going to make a difference in the world and make life better for herself as well as for others.