Estancia High School:

Ben Sievert

Ben Sievert has a problem with authority, and he knows it.

That, along with a tumultuous personal life, made his road to graduation almost impossibly difficult. It didn’t really set in for the Estancia High School senior until this week that he would be graduating today.

Ben started his high school career at Costa Mesa High School, where he said he was kicked out for failing all but one of his classes freshman year. He never showed up to class and hardly did the work sheets teachers assigned, but said he would put in the effort when a subject interested him.

It was only after he left Mesa for a local continuation school that he realized the fate to which he had consigned himself.

“I said, ‘I’m smarter than this. I don’t want to be here,’” Ben recalls.

But it wasn’t that easy to make it back to a “normal” high school. Administrators at the continuation school said he had to stay at the school, so Ben resorted to a familiar tactic: “I came up with the brilliant plan of doing nothing for two weeks, so they kicked me out.”

He ended up at an independent study program where he got enough credits finished to reenter a regular high school and started at Estancia, but that wasn’t the end of his troubles. Ben was on parole for an alleged incident of domestic violence, which he said was fabricated, and he was forced to do community service clean-up projects on the weekends. After missing a few of his scheduled projects he was put on house arrest and later sent to juvenile hall less than a month into his enrollment at Estancia.

When he got out two months later, he landed back at Estancia one-third of the way through the academic year and frantically worked to get good grades. Despite his troubles, not going to college was never really an option for him, and he showed up in a big way during the latter half of the year, earning a 3.5 GPA when his cumulative average up to that point was below 2, he said.

He will walk with his short-time classmates today and start with a clean slate at OCC next year.

— Alan Blank