A’drianna White was already on her second chance at high school when she became a mom.

After beginning freshman year at McKay High School, a house fire and other disruptions got in the way of classes. 

Then Covid hit. She stopped attending, preferring to spend time outside or be with her friends.

“I barely even opened my computer,” she said.

She didn’t have much guidance at home. One parent was out of the picture and another struggled with her own problems. White often looked after her two younger siblings.

For most of her life, she said she’d been told she wasn’t going to make it. Her middle school classmates had voted her “most likely to get in a fight at a wedding.”

White dropped out her junior year. She bounced between friends and family, sometimes staying on couches.

Now, she’s graduated from Roberts High School and is preparing to attend college to become a mortician.

It wasn’t an easy path.

She returned to school in the fall of 2022. Friends persuaded her to enroll at Roberts, Salem’s alternative high school. 

“I didn’t like the feeling of not being able to have better than what I was shown,” she said. “I was like, OK, I need my diploma.”

She started senior year needing to finish 17 credits of the 24 total required to graduate.

That didn’t faze her.

“I knew I was going to graduate. I thought I was going to graduate that year but I knew I was going to get my diploma no matter what,” White said.

In January 2023, she learned she was pregnant.

The teachers who’d gotten to know her at Roberts knew having a baby would make graduating harder. But White was in a better position than many pregnant teenagers. She was already attending an alternative high school that has a teen parent program on-site, offering flexible and small classes and a full nursery for students to leave their babies during class.

Carrie Litchfield, a teacher in the school’s teen parent program, said they never doubted White.

“She had the gumption and the grit and the determination that nothing was going to hold her back,” she said. “We just were like, ‘You’re going to be such a good mom.’”

She came to school every day, taking the city bus and continuing her classwork.

Her daughter Jerzi-Lynn was born that September. 

White was back in the computer lab two weeks after her Caesarean section. She took a few online classes while holding her newborn.

“She was an easy baby,” White said. “She hardly cried, only cried when she was hungry.”

White found a stable home living with her mentor through YoungLives, a program for teen parents outside of school.

Her daughter, now 20 months old, has thrived in the child care program attached to the school.

She has a group of friends and is “so smart because of them, she’s so social,” White said.

Even with support, being a single parent while in school is hard, White said. When she gets frustrated, she does her best to explain to her toddler so her daughter doesn’t blame herself. It’s not something she was raised with.

“Mommy just got mad with herself, you’re not doing anything wrong,” she’ll tell Jerzi-Lynn.

White received the Accepting the Challenge of Excellence Award through the local chapter of the Exchange Club, and is now in the running for a national scholarship.

She’s been a mentor to other girls in the teen parent program, teachers said, serving as a quiet role model.

“Nobody listens to me like they listen to you,” Litchfield said in a joint interview. 

In the fall, White plans to attend Mt. Hood Community College’s funeral service education program. She wants to be a mortician, helping care for people and families as they confront death.

 “It’s more for me to give my light to other people,” she said of her career choice.

White also hopes to study cosmetology so she can do hair, nails and makeup for the deceased and make them look as they would have in life.

“I can give their loved ones that final look before they say their goodbyes,” she said.

Her teachers at the teen parent program say she and her bright-eyed daughter will be missed.

“You did this all on your own which takes an insane amount of resiliency and determination,” Litchfield said.

Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.

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