My name is Maria Vargas.  I started as an immigrant, a hard working single mother of three, but most of all, I am the proud mother of Marcos, who is currently a junior at Rauner College Prep.  I became a single mother during my Junior year in High School, so it hasn’t always been easy to help Marcos succeed in school.  For a few long and difficult years, Marcos attended our neighborhood middle school and was falling behind.  He wasn’t able to see a bright future ahead and started to lose all motivation.  It was nearly impossible to get him to try his best.  This started to have an impact on both of us, and that’s when I knew we needed to find a better option.

 

Throughout my life, I have made it my goal to watch my son succeed and grow into a responsible young man.  Luckily, after years of searching for the right school, we finally found Rauner College Prep.  I now have a team at Rauner working with me to achieve my goal and to help prepare Marcos for the next phase of his life – college.

 

During his time at Rauner, Marcos has been able to flourish into a driven and responsible student.  He has been given so many unbelievable opportunities to take advantage of.  If you told me 5 years ago that Marcos would be traveling to Europe with some of his classmates for spring break, I wouldn’t believe you!  He has so many things to do on campus after school that he’s rarely home around dinner time.  It’s awesome to know that he is at school taking advantage of all these opportunities. These opportunities have begun to help Marcos decide what he wants to do with his future and who he wants to become.

 

Now that I’ve been able to see my son grow into the young man he is today, I can look back and be thankful for his community at Rauner.  His experience in high school has given him the second chance he needed to get motivated and stay on track.  He knows that he is capable of doing anything that he wants now, and I can’t imagine where we would be if he didn’t have the support that he has in school today. The individual attention that my son gets at school guides him in the right direction and helps him make better decisions in life. As a mother, being able to see Marcos succeed is a blessing!