‘Yeah, OK, I did cry,” admitted Patrick Baldwin, a Merrill Lynch vice president and private wealth manager who was minding his own business when he made the mistake of attending a benefit three years ago for the inspiring Right Angle Educational Foundation.
“Six kids spoke,” Baldwin recalled, “and it was so emotional, because they’re changing these kids’ lives.” Baldwin’s life changed, too: “I had always just sent in a check; now, I’m on the board,” he said on Friday night at the third annual Right Angle benefit.
Dubbed “Taste of College” and held at the raw loft space of A. Finkl & Sons steel mill in Lincoln Park, the party drew 350 supporters and raised $30,000 for the foundation, which sends low-income high school students from Chicago’s West Town community to summer college-enrichment programs.
West Town’s largely Hispanic neighborhoods have a dismal 50 percent graduation rate from its four high schools: Roberto Clemente, Holy Trinity, Noble Street Charter and William H. Wells Community Academy.
But thanks to Right Angle, more than 250 sophomores and juniors have spent summers taking classes with other high school students at Harvard, Georgetown, Illinois and other universities.
What’s more, says Michael Milkie, who launched the foundation in 1996, “every student in the program has gone on to graduate high school.” And 85 percent went on to four-year colleges.
Several of Right Angle’s beneficiaries manned the coat check Friday night. Annie Souchet, 17, hung out at Harvard last summer studying quantitative reasoning and astronomy (“It was very difficult — I didn’t realize how much physics and math were involved,” she said of the latter); meanwhile, her pal Melanie Lopez, 16, applied herself to marine biology at the University of California at San Diego, where she dissected a horn shark she named “Billy.”
Inside, Ald. Theodore Matlak (32nd) and Ald. Manuel Flores (1st) sipped ice water before presenting awards to two of the program’s outstanding achievers: Juan Reyes, who visited Penn State before his junior year of high school and is now a University of Illinois math major with a 3.2 grade-point average; and the soft-spoken Norma Gutierrez, who told a rapt crowd about not speaking English when she arrived at a West Town kindergarten soon after her family emigrated from Mexico.
Later, college seemed an unlikely option. “My parents didn’t get through grammar school,” she explained, “so I had no footsteps to follow in.”
But through Right Angle, she spent a summer at the University of Vermont, where she studied math and tried kayaking and whitewater rafting — “things I’d only seen on TV.” She went on to graduate from Knox College and is now a math teacher in her old neighborhood, at Noble Street Charter.
“I guess I’ve come full circle,” Gutierrez said, “and I thank you, as I thank my friend Mr. Milkie for helping me . . . “
Her voice trailed off, and long seconds of silence passed as Gutierrez choked off her budding tears and finally quipped, “I guess I’m the one to cry this year.”
“Thank you all for helping,” she concluded. “You truly are going to change a life.”
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Lucinda Hahn is at lhahn@tribune.com.
