As she waits for the mail to bring a $1,000 scholarship check, and with it the chance to surprise her hardworking mom, 21-year-old Hartnell College freshman Iris Lira Perez has much to look forward to.
Her near-term goals are acceptance into Hartnell’s nursing program, completion of her degree and the start of a career helping others – including her own Salinas family, thanks to the financial boost of a well-paid profession.
What a difference a year makes: In the past 12 months, Lira Perez has gone from an uncertain future to completion of her high school equivalency diploma and now the start of her third term as a Hartnell student.
“It was like a door opening to a new world,” she said, recalling her discovery of Hartnell’s High School Equivalency Program (HEP) after finally summoning the courage to visit the Admissions Office.
That was August 2019. This month, she learned she will receive a National HEP/CAMP Association Scholarship for high school equivalency students – the achievement she can’t wait to tell her mother about.
That mom, Cerenia Perez, is a native of Mexico who has raised four grown children on her own. She alternates between work in Salinas Valley agricultural fields and cooling facilities for fresh produce.
Said Lira Perez, “I feel like my opportunities are her opportunities, too.”
Overcoming some hesitation, she applied for the HEP/CAMP scholarship early last month at the urging of Hartnell HEP Director Laura Zavala. The application required a 500-word essay describing her family’s “farmwork experience, financial need and academic goals.”
Lira Perez drafted and honed her account, including a health struggle that kept her from graduating with her Alisal High School classmates in 2017.
“Having to deal with mental health issues has had an impact on my life several times,” she wrote in the essay, “but it has not stopped me from reaching my dreams and goals in life.”
Lira Perez said she had always been a successful and determined student, planning to attend college as early as seventh grade. But anxiety and depression descended late in her junior year of high school, and by the end of her senior year she was struggling even to attend classes.
While friends looked toward college, she began “a gap year that turned into two gap years,” including her own experience of hard work picking strawberries and experiencing the chill of the coolers.
“Then it just clicked in my head,” Lira Perez said. “‘I’ve got to do something. I don’t want to be working minimum wage my whole life.’”
That’s when she discovered HEP, whose staff and faculty she said “were like a little family to me.”
“I felt they were the people who helped me start my educational path,” Lira Perez said. “If I did not now about them, I was not going to be able to take classes at Hartnell. They always were very supportive. They would be there on Saturday if you needed extra help. They were people who wanted to see you succeed.”
She is now a student worker with HEP as she continues work on her associate degree, taking full advantage of online tutoring, adjusting to asynchronous classes and yearning for the day when she and fellow students can return to campus.
“At the beginning of last year I was so excited to finally be an actual student,” Lira Perez said. “I thought, ‘I can’t wait to have those student problems, like, oh, I have this math test.’
“I couldn’t wait to say, ‘Sorry, I can’t hang out; I’m going to class.’”
Aurelio Salazar Jr., president of the Hartnell Community College District Governing Board, said Lira Perez’s life experiences “clearly demonstrate the resiliency found in our students.”
“When connected to the right programs and services, our students can achieve anything,” Salazar said. “We're proud of Iris and look forward to seeing her on the graduation line."
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