WINNFIELD, La. — “Campus” is a fancy word for the single-story arcaded building, in a little town wrapped in pine and hardwood forest, where Olivia Cohea found her path to a better life. A young woman whose family was crushed by addiction, Cohea heard from adults in her life — even a high school teacher — that she wasn’t good at school, that she would never make anything of herself.
After dropping out of high school, checking herself into a boot camp for struggling youth, and trying to join the Army, Cohea ended up here, looking for her high school equivalency diploma. Within months, even before she earned that diploma, she became a scholarship-winning, “A” student on her way to a college credential in forestry.
The above excerpt was originally published in The Boston Globe.
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