OTHELLO — Oliver Morales said Othello High School was kind of scary at first, so scary he wanted to try homeschooling instead.

Oliver started at OHS as a freshman, straight from eighth grade in Mexico. The Morales family came to Othello due to a family situation in Mexico, and his dad had made the decision to move to the U.S. with Oliver and his three brothers.

He didn’t speak very much English, “only the basics,” and that made it difficult. “I felt like I didn’t fit in,” he said. He asked his dad about homeschooling, but his dad said no.

But Oliver learned English and kept up with his classes. He will graduate third in his class and has earned a scholarship to the University of Washington.

It wasn’t always easy. “I came here, I had to start all over again.” But he was a good student and wanted to stay a good student. And he wanted to help his family..

“That’s something I really wanted to do,” he said. He plans to study medicine, his ambition since childhood, when he saw the doctor at work treating his grandmother. “I wanted to be like that guy.”

But helping his family required a good education, and that meant persevering at OHS.

As a freshman he was in the ELL program, where some of the coursework is taught in Spanish while kids are learning English. But as a sophomore he asked the counselors to enroll him in general classes. He wanted the challenge, he said, and he didn’t want to fall behind in his classwork. And he wanted to be in the same classes as most other kids at OHS.

It was a struggle at first, he said. But he had friends who helped him learn English, and who helped him translate the coursework when necessary. The biggest hurdle Oliver had to overcome, he said, was his own fear that he couldn’t do it.

It turned out he could do it. He kept his grades up, joined the tennis team his junior and senior years. He will graduate with a 3.96 grade point average.

His mom will be there too. She had stayed behind in Mexico, moving to Othello before Oliver’s senior year. “She wanted to see my graduation.”

He has a job lined up for the summer – he’s working weekends already – and will take summer classes at Big Bend Community College. He’s “overwhelmed but excited” by the thought of going to college, but it’s kind of challenging to be leaving Othello. He’s ready for the next step, he said, “but at the same time, I’m going to miss everybody.”

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].