Mother’s lessons lead Newport Harbor senior to Harvard

“I was a sponge mop and Windex baby,” the college essay began.

Over the next few paragraphs, the writer, Jose Avonce, a senior at Newport Harbor High School, described cleaning houses alongside his mother, a Mexican immigrant with a sixth-grade education. What his mother lacked in formal schooling, Jose wrote, she made up in life lessons.

“Wiping every speck of dust, neatly tucking bed sheets and meticulously ironing clothes — my mother taught me to do a good job on everything, no matter how long it takes,” wrote the 18-year-old, who lives with his mother, father, sister and grandmother in Costa Mesa. “She attends Back to School Nights, and though she can’t understand what the teachers are saying, she’s proud to be a Latina woman in my Advanced Placement classrooms.”

The essay landed in the mailbox of the admissions office at Harvard University. The elite university was one of nearly a dozen colleges that Jose, who has a 4.25 G.P.A, applied to last year.

Although he couldn’t know it then, his application for early acceptance was among nearly 6,000 submitted to Harvard by college hopefuls from across the country.

Then, in December, while Jose was in a college prep class, an email from the venerated university arrived. He stared at the message on his phone. Minutes stretched into a half hour. His mind raced, but his fingers were frozen. Was he accepted?

College aspirations bloomed early for Jose.

“My mom told me you don’t want to clean houses or mow lawns the rest of your life,” Jose said Wednesday after school. It’s honest work, but she wanted more for her son.

Jose is sitting in a cheery study room in an apartment building that was transformed into a neighborhood after-school program called Shalimar Learning Center about 20 year ago. The center is named for the street in front of it. Since first grade, Jose has studied here off and on after school. His family lives in an apartment across the street. In this neighborhood, where according to an official with the center, about 20% of high school grads go to college, every single teen in this program has gone on to college over the last six years.

Jose said he eschewed skateboarding with neighborhood boys for poring over textbooks at the center. Most school days, he’d hop off the bus and walk here. He said he would pull on earphones to block out distractions. Sometimes he would sit on the grass outside where it was quiet.

His dreams grew.

His grades were good. He told his mother he wanted to go to a top college — one of the best. She told him, “Yes honey, dreaming doesn’t hurt you.”

Jose clicked open the email.

He read the word “congratulations,” but it didn’t sink in. Jose showed the message to his teacher. Was it real?

“It was surreal,” Jose said. “I called my mom, but when I told her she was crying so hard that she couldn’t speak.”

Jose was among the 977 prospective freshmen Harvard notified of early acceptance in December.

The students are geographically and racially diverse, with a large share who come from impoverished families, according to a Harvard announcement. At 23%, Asians made up the largest share of those admitted, while Latinos were second at 11%. It’s likely the university will pay for Jose’s tuition, which ran $43,938 in the 2014-15 school year. Jose is still waiting for his financial aid paperwork to go through.

At his high school, five students have been accepted to Harvard in the last five years, a district spokeswoman said. At Corona del Mar High School, a school where 99% of students go to college, five students have been accepted in as many years.

Jose hasn’t yet said yes to Harvard’s offer, but he’s “98% sure” he will.

For now, he wears a crimson T-shirt that bears the emblem of Harvard University. Across the street, is the apartment he shares with his family, the home where his dreams began. Across the country, some 3,000 miles from here, is likely his future.

[For the record, 1:30 p.m., Feb. 13: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that seven students at Newport Harbor High School have been accepted to Harvard University in the past five years. The correct number is five.]