Printer Friendly Version - Struggle Shaped Her Success

Motivated by a fellow student's view of her "perfect life," Jamie Lawler knew it was time to share her remarkable personal story, which includes being homeless and pregnant at 16, with others needing inspiration to follow their academic dreams. Accepted to five top-tier law schools, the Guilford resident will attend UConn School of Law with a full merit scholarship in the fall.

Headed to UConn School of Law on a full scholarship this fall, Guilford's Jamie Lawler is the picture of success-and miles away from her time as a homeless, pregnant teen desperately cracking her first law book at a public library.

Jamie's struggle has, in many ways, shaped the person she is, as a wife, mother of three, and remarkably successful student and future attorney.

"I'd sort of been raised that everybody has problems and there's not much point in dwelling on them. Just keep going, and everything will work out," says Jamie.

In May, Jamie graduated magna cum laude as political science valedictorian, with a B.S. in political science and minors in history and psychology, from Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). She also received the prestigious Barnard Distinguished Student Award. Her goal is to become an attorney specializing in child advocacy.

In her four years at SCSU, Jamie was an active student leader and served as vice president of the State University Pre-Law Society. It was through her work helping other students that Jamie realized her story could help others.

"One of the students I was helping was going through a tough time," says Jamie, recounting how money planned for his college expenses was taken by family members. "So he didn't have any way to get to school or any way to get his books. He said I couldn't understand because my life was perfect and that he needed to drop out of school because he didn't have any other choice. I told him that he did, and I realized I was maybe doing a disservice to those who think everybody at the top, everybody who has found any success, has had the path paved for them in some way."

Jamie's grateful her path as a confident student got its foothold in Guilford, where she was raised from 1st through 7th grade. She moved back to town with her husband and children three years ago.

"I do count Guilford as my home and where I grew up, because it's probably the town I've lived in the longest. After my parents were divorced, we moved here, and I loved it here. I won writing awards, did well in school, excelled in sports. I was very, very happy," says Jamie. "I moved back to Guilford three years ago because it was important to come back for my children, not just for myself. I've been bounced around and been through lots of different school systems. The Guilford school system is better than them all…Regardless of [your] socioeconomic status, the schools treat each child like they could be the future president, and I think the kids wear it quite proudly."

When Jamie was entering 8th grade, she left Guilford, moving with her mom and brother to Wallingford.

Her mom "worked in Wallingford and had family in Wallingford, so we moved there, and that's where it started not to work out so well," says Jamie. "We're from a mixed family; we're half Hawaiian, which you can't tell by looking at me, but you can tell abundantly by looking at my brother."

The siblings were at the receiving end of peer discrimination, fostered by a "pretty strong Ku Klux Klan presence," says Jamie. "There is encouragement from white supremacy groups in the area, and it confuses kids."

When her brother, a 5th grader, was beaten at school, "naturally, being his big sister, I tried to help him, which meant I was getting into fights, and so it wasn't working out very well," says Jamie. "Eventually my mother sent him to a private school, which she couldn't afford, and I remained in public school. I was attacked in school to the point where the town paid for a home school tutor until they could figure something else out."

"They came to my home. They burnt my brother with cigarettes, and my nose is permanently crooked," says Jamie of the attack, which was reported to police. "We were involved in the court system for other issues, and it was decided it just wasn't safe for me. They put me in a group home, which was wonderful, for a little while. It was the first place in a long time where I really felt safe. I did well in school, and everything was fine."

Jamie was 16 years old, attending Plainfield public schools, when she became pregnant.

"A lot of people in group homes aren't necessarily there because they don't have problems, so putting a lot of problem teens together in one house makes it difficult to run in a necessarily human and loving way," says Jamie. "I felt alone and ended up pregnant."

She had no one to fall back on for help, including her mother. While Jamie can't explain exactly what her mother was going through at the time, "she probably felt like a bit of a failure and sort of retreated a bit," she says. "So I was 16 and pregnant, and the problem is you can't stay in a home like that if you're pregnant. There are various programs, but the only way you can participate is if you give up your child, which I wasn't comfortable doing. It didn't feel right to me to give up my child in order to have some place to live."

Seeking alternatives from adults in her life, "no one I talked to had very many answers. I asked the group home staff...They said they'd have me arrested as a runaway if I couldn't live there anymore, which didn't make any sense, because they were telling me I couldn't live there anymore-so how could I be a runaway?"

"So I found myself in the local library in that town and I looked up everything I could on Connecticut child custody laws. I found out that, at the age of 16, your parents are responsible for your feeding and sheltering, but they can't actually tell you where you have to be. The same thing applied because the state never technically had custody of me. So no one could force me to give up my custodial rights, and I could just walk out. So I did, and they called the police, and it was a wonderful point of pride for me and my researching abilities," says Jamie.

The officer who collected Jamie from a friend's house and returned her to the group home had listened to Jamie's explanation that she couldn't be charged as a runaway and made a bet that, if the group home staff admitted the point, he'd help her collect her things and move out.

"He brought me there, and the group home staff told him I was right-which really upset him-and then he helped me pack and carried my things," says Jamie.

"I couldn't stay with my friend, so I ended up sleeping in a local park, right on the border of a farm," says Jamie, who slept in a treeline among bushes to stay out of sight. "Luckily it was springtime, so the bathrooms were open, so I'd wash in a public restroom."

This continued for upwards of a month, during which time Jamie found a job busing tables at a local restaurant. The restaurant fed her one meal a day, so she wouldn't go hungry.

"I didn't qualify for any kind of state aid because my parents had custody of me even though it wasn't safe for me to reside there, according to the court, and I was not allowed to stay at the group home because I was pregnant, so I fell through the cracks," says Jamie. "But I did save up enough to rent a room in a local woman's home and I did continue to go to school, where I was on the honor roll."

"I had taken my PSAT and done phenomenally well, and they noticed my address was different from the group home," says Jamie. "They made a phone call and they found out I was no longer living there, called me down to the office, and asked me to turn in my books. My parents didn't pay taxes in that town, so they said I wasn't allowed to participate in that school system. I would have to go back to the school system where my parents paid taxes; where I was not allowed to go because the court had already deemed it was unsafe. My mother tried to have me emancipated without telling me at the point, so going home was not an option."

Still, Jamie pressed on, completing her GED in 1999 with honors through Wallingford Adult Education, one month ahead of her graduating class. She gave birth to her daughter, met and married a young Air Force serviceman (she was 16; he was 18), amicably divorced, and literally bumped into her current husband.

"I met my husband at 18," says Jamie. "I'd just got my driver's license and backed into his truck! We've been together ever since."

Jamie obtained a certificate in medical billing/insurance claims analysis with Branford Hall Career Institute in 2001, but found it was "not a particularly high-paying career." She also worked as a bartender, a waitress, and at a gas station to help make ends meet. Reconciled with her mom, who'd joined the Peace Corps, Jamie traveled with her to Romania in 2004 for a life-changing visit.

"I was happy being a mom and happy with my spouse, who I wasn't married to just yet, until I went to Romania and got to see the devastation of a former communist dictatorship turned democracy," says Jamie, who toured with a representative from a Romanian senator's office. "It was very corrupt, and there was a heavy homeless population, which obviously hit a strong note with me."

Of the scores of unregistered Gypsy children she encountered, Jamie was especially struck by one small family.

"It absolutely broke my heart. There was a girl, holding a baby, and a five year-old boy, and [the senator's representative] was yelling at them when they were begging. I asked her what she said, and she'd told them all they needed to do was go fill out paperwork to register and they'd take care of them. She told them this, not knowing if these children spoke Romanian, and acknowledging the fact that the boy was no more than five! So the thought of telling him to go to a random government building somewhere-how was he getting there, does he know how to write his name? So obviously, I had some things to say about that…to which her response was, 'Is America really perfect? Doesn't anyone ever fall through the cracks?' Well here I am, having slept in a park because I fell through the cracks, and there was literally nothing anyone could do. So I decided that I needed to go back to school and I wanted to go into law. I wanted to do advocacy work [to] actually change the way things were happening, so less people would fall through the cracks."

Jamie planned to enter college following her wedding in 2006, but a second pregnancy with a son born on the autism spectrum (now thriving with help from a shoreline-based school), followed by her third son, now five, delayed those plans a bit.

Finally, in spring 2010, Jamie signed up as a 28 year-old non-traditional freshman undergraduate at SCSU.

"It was incredibly hard to juggle, but it was wonderful while I was there," says Jamie of her time at SCSU.

"Whatever I lacked for a home growing up, school always felt like a home. And that was what I wanted to share with this student who thought I had a perfect life," says Jamie. "Everything else may fall apart, but there's no reason not to pursue academia, because [college] is logical: you know exactly what's going to happen, you know exactly what's expected of you, and there's no reason you can't do this-especially if things are bad at home. Come here and breathe a little."