Yes this is a 100% feel good story.  Deal with it.  When the politics and bs in the world get me down I like a story that shows how great people can be.  We had two classes of hero here:  The student who refused to fail, and the school and community that rallied behind her.

I saw this on Fox News, on Heartland, and tracked it down. 

Read it and weep.

Brandon High School Lifted Grad From Shadows

The call came into the main office at Brandon High School from a teacher who found a mess under portable classroom No. 24.

There was a cardboard box, about the size of a mattress. There were empty plastic water bottles and several wadded-up McDonald’s bags.

Assistant Principal Stephanie Davis was among those who went to investigate. She stood by the steps of the portable classroom while another administrator crawled through the narrow gap between the damp ground and the classroom floor.

They weren’t sure what they would find — perhaps a vagrant — but the mystery quickly unfolded piece by piece.

They found duffel bags, saturated by a recent rain and filled with sopping-wet clothes. They found a cushion that served as a makeshift pillow. Then they found a small Army ROTC uniform, wrinkled and ruined by mold and mud.

It wasn’t until they found a bag loaded with textbooks and assignments that it became clear who was living under the building, a few yards from the Brandon High gymnasium.

Davis recalled the revulsion she felt when she realized, “Oh my God, it’s a student.”

On Thursday afternoon at the Florida State Fairgrounds, Shawna Sutherland joined her classmates at the graduation ceremony for Brandon High seniors.

She is among the smallest students in her class at 5 feet tall, but on this day she stood among the tallest.

She is one of Brandon’s brightest, an honors student with a 4.6 grade point average and accomplishments that include membership in the National Honor Society, Spanish Honor Society and several top awards in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Her teachers say she is well-liked, responsible and willing to volunteer for any service project.

Shawna is scheduled to report for Army basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., on June 14.

She will study water treatment. College may come after she completes her tour of duty in 3 1/2 years, or she may attempt to realize a long-time dream of attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

But for about a month this year, she lived under a portable building at the school after a dispute at home that left her with no place to stay.

When she was discovered in mid-March, she moved in with a teacher to avoid being sent to a state shelter.

While Shawna lived under the portable, a part-time job at a nearby McDonald’s provided money for school lunches and food on the weekends.

She showered in the locker room and hung around the JROTC offices after classes until the instructors said it was time to go home for the night.

“I wasn’t really scared or anything. My biggest problem was that I had nothing to do,” she said. “I had my CD player, and I did my homework. I would only go under when it was time to sleep.”

She kept up with a course load that included advanced placement macroeconomic and honors English and physics. To combat boredom, she watched baseball and softball games at the school fields.

Her cell phone doubled as an alarm clock, waking her in time to dress and crawl from under the portable before being discovered.

Her secret almost came out when Bob Maestas, who is Brandon’s cross country team coach and a sergeant in JROTC, bumped into her early one morning.

“I remember telling her, ‘Shawna, it looks like you slept in those clothes,’” he said.

Family Didn’t Know

She hasn’t seen her mother in years; Shawna thinks she is in Jamaica. She lived with her father and a family friend, Vivian Tucker, at their home in Brandon until leaving in mid-February.

Tucker “alluded to wanting me out of the house, but she didn’t say it outright,” Shawna said. “I tried to stay at my friend’s house, but they couldn’t let me stay there and told me I had to go home. I tried more and more to stay away from home.”

Tucker said Shawna was a runaway and was never forced to leave. She assumed Shawna was staying with friends. She said they haven’t spoken since Shawna left the house.

“I had no idea that was going on,” Tucker said. Shawna’s father did not respond to an interview request.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office investigated because Shawna was 17 when she left — she has since turned 18 — but filed no charges.

There Were Suspicions

Her appearance was among the first red flags for school officials. She was meticulous about her clothing, but all that deteriorated the longer she spent under the portable.

ROTC cadets are required to dry clean their uniforms, but her uniform was wrinkled and dirty, leading the instructors to question her about what was going on in her life. She told them nothing was wrong.

“The way I was raised, you just don’t talk about that kind of thing,” she said.

Shawna’s secret was discovered a couple days after the meeting with her instructors. She wasn’t there when administrators pulled the evidence from under the portable. The book bag gave her away.

They approached her while she was working at McDonald’s.

“We told her we knew where she had been staying and what was going on,” Davis said. “She started to cry, and I asked her what happened. She said she just couldn’t live at home anymore and didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

The question then became how best to help Shawna. She needed a place to stay; without that, she would become a ward of the state and could have been moved to a shelter out of the Brandon district. The final two months of her senior year would have been finished at another school.

“I wasn’t going to let that happen,” said Michelle Miller, a specialist in the exceptional student program at Brandon.

Miller offered to let Shawna move into her Riverview home and later called her husband to tell him, “Guess what?”

Shawna’s clothing essentially was destroyed by the long damp nights under the portable, so Miller took her shopping for clothes.

Miller said she was just carrying on a family tradition: Her mother and grandmother had both been foster parents. She got Shawna’s father to permit his daughter to stay with her, and Shawna became part of the family.

As word began to circulate throughout the school, other Brandon teachers and administrators offered help. One teacher bought Shawna a gown for the ROTC military ball. Shawna repaid them by completing her studies. Her grade point average improved by 0.2.

‘Such A Great Kid’

Hillsborough officials say that while this case is extreme, they suspect Shawna is far from the only student to live on her own. There are no reliable numbers, however, because students frequently don’t inform the school.

“Not all the cases have the happy ending this one does,” said Ken Gaughan, a supervisor for the school system’s social worker services. “This one is a little bit remarkable. A lot of times when kids are on their own, they just drop out of school.”

“We would never have let that happen,” Miller said. “Shawna is such a great kid, and having her in my home has been a seamless transition.

Brandon High was such a special place for her, and we had to make sure she could finish here.”

Shawna shyly smiled when asked about the village it took to help her finish high school. She lowered her eyes, hunched her shoulders, shifted in her chair, and slowly spoke words that came straight from the heart.

“They’re the greatest,” she said.

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