Kelloggsville — If you had asked Gideon Bosco a year ago whether he’d be graduating with the class of 2025, he would have admitted that he had his doubts.
But with his mother as his inspiration and the support of many Kelloggsville staff members, Gideon walked down the commencement ceremony aisle in May.
“I looked at it as like, if I don’t do well, I won’t be able to make my mama proud,” he said. “That’s how I looked at it. If I don’t graduate this year, how would she look at it? How would she feel?
“I look at it as, she wanted me to be stronger by myself, instead of (being impacted by) other things outside of me.”
Finding His Path
Gideon came to the U.S. with his mother, brother and sister as refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo when he was a young boy, initially settling in Rhode Island.
“I feel like she was all our inspiration,” said Gideon of his mother. “Everything we still do now, we do it for her.”
She died when he was 9, and afterward, he and his siblings moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to live with other family members. His sophomore year of high school, they relocated to Kentwood to be closer to a larger network of family and friends.
Gideon enrolled at Kelloggsville Public Schools, and although it was different from his school in Kansas City, he said the transition went smoothly.
“The environment is different because students here are more calm, more accepting, in a way,” Gideon said, adding that students from different grade levels mix and build connections with one another.
He earned mostly A’s his first year at Kelloggsville. But everything changed his junior year, when family turmoil began to affect his performance at school.
“My grades were just going down,” Gideon recalled, from A’s to D’s in some classes. “I just didn’t feel like there was any purpose to graduate. I lost the purpose for graduating, even for (attending) school.”
Others — both at home and at school — began to notice. Once such person was school counselor Ashley Morse.
“He really struggled his junior year,” Morse recalled. “He was struggling to find where he fit in life, while also dealing with personal hardships and trauma. He needed people to listen to him, believe in him and help guide him along his path.”
After missing several school days, Gideon’s family pulled together to help him understand the importance of graduating.
“During the summer, I would just reflect,” he said. “I didn’t go anywhere; I just stayed in the house all summer, because I was reflecting on what had just happened, of not going to school all the time.
“I was thinking about (my mother’s) feelings, and how (she would be) feeling about what’s going on.”
Turning It Around
Gideon made the decision he wanted to graduate, but doing so would be an uphill battle. He needed to make up three classes from his junior year while a senior.
“I didn’t know how hard it was going to be,” he said.
Morse said people could see the change in Gideon and how dedicated he was.
“You could tell he was taking pride in his work,” she said. “I am very proud of how hard he worked to get back on track, and I know he will continue to succeed as he works towards his goals.”
Gideon does not have a specific career path in mind, but is thinking about taking a gap year before starting at Grand Rapids Community College.
He said he is appreciative of counselors Morse and Justice Craft for supporting him, and for teachers Malisee Henry and Ron Fron for pushing him.
Gideon said he also appreciates and respects his classmates, who, through just showing up and pushing through themselves, helped him stay committed to completing his classes.
In fact, his advice to current and future high-schoolers is to “just show up.”
“Younger classmates, like sophomores and freshmen, sometimes they slack on their classes, or someone on the basketball team says, ‘Basketball is over, so I don’t have to keep my grades up,’” Gideon said.
“But at the end of the day, (my friends and I) tell them to focus, (that) ‘If you mess up your freshman year, that means you will have to do even more your junior and senior year.’ So we always tell them, ‘Keep your grades up. No matter how bad you think you’re doing, you’re not doing as bad. Just keep it up, and then in the long run it will pay off.’”
Read more from Kelloggsville:
• ‘God gives me hope’: a refugee student’s hard journey to graduation
• ‘So many doors have opened’
