On his 12th birthday, the first Friday in June, D’Andre took the day off from school. It was out of character for the boy, an honor roll student at Newark’s Quitman Street Renew School who was the sixth grade’s student council ambassador. D’Andre was elected duke of Quitman’s winter dance last January for his exemplary citizenship and in the spring won second place in Newark’s “Attend Today, Achieve Tomorrow” digital poster contest.
But the day off promised something even more appealing to D’Andre than a brighter future: time with his mother.
She was just shy of her 19th birthday when he was born, already her second child. Mother and son wanted only to be with each other when D’Andre was a baby. But she was descending into depression and drug addiction, and they could not stay together.
On April 23, 2006, a series of hardships brought the 3-year-old boy to the doorstep of his paternal grandmother, Doris Jean, who looked into his sad eyes and vowed to raise him. It was not what she and her husband had planned, and she had to quit her job managing a dry cleaner’s, but D’Andre quickly became their world.
[For more of this story, written by Sara Neufeld, go to http://www.njspotlight.com/sto...d-s-fragile-success/]
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