❒ Katelyn Wolfe: Continuation school is ‘very close, tight-knit’; credits special programs

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Katelyn “Kia” Wolfe moved to Benicia to live with her mother a couple of years ago.

She’d dropped out of high school in Reno, and when she tried to register at Benicia High she was told she didn’t have enough credits and “wouldn’t be able to catch up.”

So Wolfe went to Liberty High. And the story had a happy ending: Earlier this month she spoke at Liberty’s graduation as the school’s valedictorian.

“It was really pretty. We had a really nice dinner before, and we had a candle-lighting ceremony,” she said of the June 7 graduation. “Everything ended up turning out beautifully.”

Wolfe described her experience at Liberty as very positive.

“They care a lot. It’s very close, tight-knit,” she said. “Because we are a smaller school, we can do something and include everyone.”

Still, she saw the stigma that came with to going to a continuation school.

“There’s a lot of people who look at Liberty and the kids that go there as bad kids, or that we’re different or stupid. Stuff like that,” she said.

“I don’t agree with it. The kids that are there, most of them messed up in credits for one reason or another, but they want to change. They want to fix their mistakes and they all try hard.”

Some students, Wolfe said, don’t work well in larger classes of the type they may have experienced elsewhere. “Sometimes if you don’t understand something, they can’t stop the entire class to talk to you about it. If you do understand something right away that the rest of the class doesn’t, then you are stuck going over it again and again and you’re just bored,” she said.

“At Liberty they’ll give you other work. Or if you don’t understand they’ll sit down and they’ll talk with you and they’ll help you after school, they’ll stay late, they’ll come early, they’ll give you extra assignments.”

She found history to be one of her most challenging subjects, “but there was so much help and I could always talk to my history teacher. It was simple to catch up and get help with anything I didn’t understand.”

Wolfe spent time as a student representative, giving reports at district Board of Trustees meetings. She also was also involved in effecting small changes at the school, including a policy shift that allowed students to bring their own beverages to school.

Now Wolfe is looking ahead, planning to work part-time and go to college, possibly Solano Community College, as she pursues an eventual degree in criminal psychology.

“Criminals have always interested me in the way that their brains are different and how they can rationalize, you know, taking someone’s life or something like that, and they don’t view it as an issue,” she said. “They rationalize it in their own head to make it right.”

In her valedictorian’s speech, Wolfe delivered a message “from the heart, about where I came from, and how life-changing the school is,” she said. “I think everyone enjoyed that.”

As she prepares for life after high school, Kia Wolfe has a few final observations for Liberty students.

“All the special programs our school offers, our youth and family services, they were such a good help,” she said. “A lot of people don’t want to take their anger and drug classes, but they’re really super helpful. Everyone ends up loving them.

“And I want to tell them not to let the stigma of Liberty get to them. They know who they are, and they know who we are, and we’re not like that.”