Teacher who dropped out recalls experience to inspire at-risk students

By Paul Takahashi

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 | 1:55 a.m.

Tears well up in Deborah LaPlante’s eyes as she sits at the back of the Orleans Arena, watching intently as her students file one by one across the stage to receive their high school diplomas.

As with most graduations, it’s a joyful occasion. Parents are smiling, teachers are beaming and students are radiating pride and hope for the future.

LaPlante, a 51-year-old teacher at Chaparral High School, never experienced the triumph of a high school graduation. In 1976, she dropped out of Orange Glen High School in Escondido, Calif., just a few weeks into her junior year. She was 16.

“I lived in a very abusive home so I dropped out and I left,” LaPlante said. “I knew I was smart enough to finish school, but I just dropped out.”

She’s gone on to a successful teaching career and is devoted to propelling her students to excel. At Chaparral, one of the Clark County School District’s eternally struggling high schools, it isn’t an easy task.

On Monday, graduation day, three of her success stories shared how they earned their diplomas. Their triumphs and struggles, in many ways, parallel LaPlante’s.

•••

Earlier this school year, Natalie Vasquez was on the verge of dropping out. The 18-year-old Chaparral student was failing most of her classes.

“I thought I might as well drop out because they told me I’m not graduating on time,” Vasquez said. “But Mrs. LaPlante told me her story and that made me believe that I could graduate.”

LaPlante encouraged Vasquez to go to night school at Cowan High School, where she took part in an 18-week credit retrieval program. Throughout her second semester senior year — when most of her fellow students started to celebrate the end of high school — Vasquez plugged away through her classes and earned enough credits to graduate Monday with the rest of her class.

She plans to enroll at Pima Medical Institute to become a pharmacy technician.

“I’m beyond proud. I can’t even believe it,” Vasquez said. “Mrs. LaPlante means a lot to me. She’s the reason why I’m graduating. She made me realize there’s a better life out there and that a negative attitude isn’t good.”

•••

One way LaPlante connects with her students is by explaining her past to them.

She tells them about how for months after she dropped out, she moved around, but ended up staying with her biological father in Michigan. She soon realized she had to go back to school to prove herself to all the people in her life who had doubted her.

“I realized that education is important,” she said. “My mother was a dropout, and I wanted to be totally opposite of my mother.

“I was kind of a rebel,” she said. “I could’ve gotten good grades but I didn’t. There was nobody in my life who told me you could graduate and go to college. It was just not expected of me.”

Within six months of dropping out, LaPlante got her General Educational Development diploma, a high school equivalency degree. A year later, LaPlante married her high school boyfriend — a career military man. By the time she was 22, she had two children.

Through working, raising children and even a six-year stint living on a Japanese military base, LaPlante persevered and earned a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies.

It took nearly a decade of study, but LaPlante became the first in her family to graduate from college. That was in 1997.

•••

When Juana Rincon was a junior last year at Chaparral, she gave birth to her son, Omar. She was just 16 years old. LaPlante was one of her teachers.

“My life became difficult because I had a baby and I’m raising him by myself (with help from family),” Rincon, 17, said. “It was tough. There were times I had to stay up really late at night because he wouldn’t sleep.”

With encouragement from LaPlante, Rincon stayed in school and learned to manage her time so she could study and raise her son.

“It never crossed my mind to drop out because I thought of Omar and giving him a better life,” she said. “Mrs. LaPlante inspired me. She quit (school), but she started all over again.”

Rincon graduated Monday with a 4.6 GPA. (A GPA of 4.0 represents straight-As, however with Advanced Placement classes, students can achieve higher GPAs.) She plans to attend Nevada State College to become a nurse.

“Even though Mrs. LaPlante is a teacher, we were able to go to her with our personal stories and lives,” she said. “She pushed us to do our work. If our grades were dropping, she kept us in check and made us raise our grades. She always pressured us to do better.”

•••

LaPlante has been in the School District since 1999, when she started out teaching Japanese at Mojave High School. She was at Mojave for eight years before moving to Chaparral, where she started its Japanese program.

Since then she has remarried, this time to a fellow Chaparral teacher, and went on to receive her master’s degree in education.

Chaparral, then as now, is a troubled school. Its graduation rate hovers around 49 percent, well below the district’s 68 percent average. (According to outside researchers however, the district average should be closer to Chaparral's graduate rate.) The dropout rate at Chaparral is 7 percent, higher than both the district and state averages of 4.5 percent.

This year, the School District placed Chaparral on a list of five turnaround schools for failing to meet its adequate early progress goals under No Child Left Behind. As a result, it will undergo a major administrative and teacher overhaul next year.

LaPlante will likely stay at Chaparral next year, she said, but it will be up to the new administration at the district level.

The reorganization at Chaparral didn’t come as a surprise to LaPlante, who for years saw students struggle to deal with the distractions of gang life, drugs, violence and poverty. Despite all the troubles, she never was the kind of teacher who wiped her hands clean when the last school bell rang.

“I tell the kids, don’t be like me,” LaPlante said. “If I’d gone to high school and gone right to college I probably would’ve been a lawyer by now. I love being a teacher, but dropping out changed my options.”

•••

As Juana Garcia, Chaparral’s valedictorian, read her graduation speech Monday, she choked up as she spoke.

Garcia, who wore a white gown with multiple colorful tassels slung around her neck, had a lot of people to thank for graduating atop her class with a 4.8 GPA. She had her parents, her family and teachers. But toward the top of her list, there was LaPlante.

“She helped us toward a path to college,” Garcia, 18, said. “She was always helping us to get scholarships, bringing in tutors to help us with homework and staying behind to help us.”

Two years ago, LaPlante became coordinator of Chaparral’s Achievement Via Individual Determination class, which helps students graduate and pursue postsecondary education. Garcia, Rincon and Vasquez were all in her class for the past two years, and all have sights set on becoming first-generation college graduates.

“I wasn’t planning on going to college but (LaPlante) was like, ‘Don’t make my same error,’ ” Garcia said. “I thought of helping my parents with work but she said I could help them a lot more if I went to college.”

Garcia plans to major in biology when she attends Nevada State College next year. She hopes to become a scientist someday.

“She pushed me,” Garcia said of LaPlante. “She’s just incredible. She’s been there for me.”

•••

In April, LaPlante was named the Kiwanis Club of Las Vegas’ 2011 Educator of the Year. The national volunteer organization awarded LaPlante the honor in large part for founding the “No F Zone” after-school tutoring program last year with her husband, Robert LaPlante, 50.

An after-school club at Chaparral, the “No F Zone” program uses incentives — food, billiards and computer time — to encourage students to pursue good grades. Held for about two hours, three days a week, the program “took off” with students and administrators, LaPlante said.

“Everybody is always pushing to try to get these kids to graduate,” she said. “I see these kids and a lot of times I see myself in them. You kind of pick up those who need that extra help.”

Robert LaPlante, who runs the school’s billiards club and teaches computer-assisted drafting next door to LaPlante, said he sympathizes with his disadvantaged students. However, the former mechanical engineer, like his wife, wants more for their students.

“Because of my education, I had options,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to tell them. Graduate and get some schooling. All we’re trying to do is inspire them to do more. Once you get out of school, it’s very hard to get back in.”

•••

A few errant air horns blared as students streamed out of the cavernous Orleans Arena, small diplomas in tow. Outside, the graduates snapped photographs of each other and their parents to capture the momentous milestone marking a step to adulthood.

Some students will remember LaPlante as simply “Mommy LaPlante.” Over the years, she has purchased — often out of her own pocket — school supplies, backpacks, even shoes for students in need.

Others will have LaPlante’s insistent, but encouraging voice caught in their head as they take their next steps forward. It’s a bleak economy out there, many a speaker told them, but this class and their teachers are hopeful.

LaPlante looked about the scene, her eyes still a bit teary-eyed. It wasn’t her graduation, but it was still special to her, she said.

“I think there are so many teachers that would do the same thing,” she said of her extra efforts to help 400 students graduate Monday. “I don’t think we’re special. I just look at it as this is what we do.”