Just a slight delay

As recently as a year ago, Emilia McNeil thought this day would never come.

The 21-year-old from Costa Mesa was done with school. She’d been to probably three adult education classes in the last three years and was busy working and paying the bills.

That all changed in September, when McNeil showed up at Back Bay/Monte Vista High School in Costa Mesa to pick up a friend and happened to run into her old principal, Deborah Davis.

Davis chatted up the girl, whom she recognized as a student there just three years earlier. Emilia remembered Davis saying, “Look, since you’re not doing anything you need to come back to school.”

“I’m going to show up at your house, you need to get done with school. This is serious. I don’t want you at any school next year. I want to see you graduated,” Emilia said Davis told her.

Without Davis’ persistence, today would have never come, “never in a million years,” Emilia said.

Emilia said when it came to school, she could be her own worst enemy.

“I have this behavior where if I don’t sit in the classroom I’m not going to want to do school,” she said.

As a freshman at Newport Harbor High School, Emilia ditched most of her classes on a daily basis.

“I was kind of rebellious,” she said.

By the middle of sophomore year, Emilia sought a better fit at Back Bay/Monte Vista, where she stayed until she turned 18 as a senior. Three classes short and now an adult, school officials sent Emilia to a county adult education school to finish off her education, she said. She probably attended three classes in the next three years before that day in September when she reunited with Davis and her high school.

“It’s a huge deal to me. That’s why I never took a [high school equivalent] test and I wanted a high school diploma and nothing was going to stop me and I was going to get it,” Emilia said. Though she needed to be reined in a few times, high school administrators kept her on top of her school work at Back Bay/Monte Vista. It paid off.

Today, Emilia becomes an official high school graduate.

For more profiles on this year’s graduates, click here.

— Joseph Serna