♪ TINA MARTIN: Next, on "Local, U.S.A."... High school graduation-- for many teenagers, this is the time when they leave home, family, friends and their comfort zone.

LU ÍS: The pressure that I have on me weighs down on me a lot.

Just realizing that life's real, and it's not a game anymore.

What I don't think I was ready for was the culture shock of going to a primarily white institution.

Why isn't there more people that look like me?

SAM: There are so many kids who I work with on a daily basis who could use another year, who could use a little bit more time, because, quite frankly, the public education system isn't preparing kids to be successful at the next level.

For me, going to college wasn't just this thing.

I needed it, because we didn't have anything.

MARTIN: "Beyond Graduation: Docs!"

Next, on "Local, U.S.A." ♪ Funding for this program was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of American Graduate: Getting to Work, a public media initiative to help communities prepare all students for success in school and careers.

Additional support has been provided by the Wyncote Foundation.

In 2018 WORLD Channel and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers teamed up on an initiative designed to help bring new voices to public media.

The topic was, "Beyond Graduation," a look at the next steps of Latinx teens finishing high school and making their first choices in adult life.

In this episode, we're presenting two of the "Beyond Graduation" documentary shorts that emerged from this project.

First, we have a piece that showcases four students as they reflect on the surprising paths they've taken since graduation.

It's called "Turns in the Road."

The filmmaker is their former high school teacher, Alan Domínguez, who introduces the short with a look behind the scenes.

♪ My name is Alan Domínguez.

I am from Denver, Colorado.

I have been making narratives and documentaries for about 16 years.

I also teach film production at a high school in the downtown area of Denver, Colorado.

♪ After students finish high school, they're confronted with a lot of decisions that they have to make very quickly.

We overemphasize finishing high school sometimes, and we forget that there is this world out there afterwards.

♪ So, we're calling the film "Turns in the Road."

"Turns in the Road" is a short documentary that follows four of my former students in the first four years after their high school experience ended.

This is going to be the first time where they all kind of get together in a room and just kind of talk about what they've been doing, why they've made the decisions they've made, what's come into play for them, and how that juxtaposes with their life in high school.

♪ Guys, do a little catch up.

What's been going on since graduation?

JOHANNA: When I got out of high school, I, I had no idea what I wanted to do at the time that you graduate... LU ÍS: I was, like, so set, "I'm going to do film," I'm like, "This is the thing I'm going to do."

And I enrolled, and I realized, I was like, "Nope, never mind, this is not my thing."

People ask me, "Well, why don't you become a citizen?

And that, like, that boils my blood.

DOM ÍNGUEZ: I did not understand how difficult a lot of their immigration tales were.

I didn't realize how much it affected all of them.

Their ability or their inability to contribute to their families really weighs heavy upon all of them.

LU ÍS: Now I'm at Community College of Denver and working at a warehouse with my dad.

DOM ÍNGUEZ: To see them be introspective and to see them insightful and self-reflective about their own lives and their decisions has been very rewarding.

♪ The idea behind this particular film is to really get people to think in larger ways, more creative ways, about what high school means to students and how we can better prepare them to leave high school and enter either the workforce or enter a post-secondary education.

♪ I'm Alan Domínguez, filmmaker and film teacher.

I teach film production here at C.E.C.

Early College of Denver, a high school that serves a predominantly Latino population made up of many first-generation American citizens.

After getting to know some of them so well, the last time I usually see them is at their graduation.

So for the first time, I've decided to turn my camera towards them and see what happens to some of the best and brightest after they walk through our doors for the last time.

♪ C.E.C.

is a high-performing school by district standards, so the teacher in me thinks we do right by our students in preparing them.

But the filmmaker in me wants to know if it is enough and if they are able to live out their dreams and where their individual roads have taken them.

♪ LU ÍS: Because I was like so set.

"I'm going to do film," and like, this is thing I'm going to do.

And I enrolled, and I... and, it's just like, I realized, I'm like, "No, never mind.

This is not my thing."

- So you actually took film classes?

- I took it, yeah.

I was in there and doing it, and then I realized, like, "No, I should probably pursue something else."

And now I'm at Community College of Denver and working at... working at a warehouse with my dad, so.

The pressure that I have on me as a student and as a child of two immigrants, I feel like... it's, it kind of weighs down on me a lot.

I kind of have to really push myself to do my best.

I think everybody is a storyteller in a way, whether it's through writing, film, music.

I don't know, I feel, like, a sense of pride saying that, because I feel like we all have something to say.

This is the neighborhood where I went to high school.

They call it the North Side.

♪ I guess stepping on the college campus first time was really terrifying.

Because you're like, you're still a little kid, basically.

You're coming in, and, like, these adults and like people that have, like, real lives; just realizing that life's real and it's not a game anymore.

(both speaking Spanish) Okay.

FATHER: LU ÍS: I'm kind of, like, torn between two things tugging at me, because I have to stay close to my parents and honor them and their, our culture and their heritage.

At the same time I'm so involved with the life here in America, it's like... kind of like, where... where is the balance at, you know?

It's just a balancing act.

FATHER: LU ÍS: I think I have to finish what my parents started in a way, because they weren't able to go to school and have all these opportunities.

It's something I can handle, but it's something that, it just keeps me on my toes.

♪ GRACE: I just went up to CSU, and I've been up there, studying human development and family studies.

What I don't think I was ready for was the culture shock of going to a primarily white institution.

You, you feel like you don't belong or you feel like you can't.

And you're like, "Well, why am I the only one here?

"Why isn't there more people that look like me?

Why isn't there more people that look like me?"

Why did I stay?

Because I didn't want to go back home.

There is just something about Fort Collins that I liked.

There's like a strange empowerment of being like, a few, one of the few people of color up here.

You enjoy it more, because you're like, "Oh, these people understand me.

These people are up here with me."

So you guys, like, enjoy it just a little bit more when you all come together.

The first time I really realized that I was, like, away from home and that, like, things were different, the culture I was in was different when I didn't have tortillas for breakfast.

♪ I just felt like if I went back home I wouldn't change or I wouldn't try and progress.

And up here I'm kind of forced to, like...

I'm forced to come out of my shell and really advocate for myself, because I can't, I'm not going to just go home to mom and dad.

And so I... it really forces me to grow up a bit.

♪ Definitely being a first-generation student, having my, my parents be undocumented, they're looking to me.

This is all they want for me, is to finish my education.

And my parents could care less if I make money.

They just want me to have a degree and to be able to say that somebody in our family got a college education.

For children of immigrants, it's... they have a big role in helping their parents out when they're here, because the kids are the ones that kind of speak the language most of the time.

And they have to help out with translating whenever they have to go to the doctor, whenever they have to go to their school or whatever, talk to their teachers.

They have to, to kind of help their parents out as much as their parents kind of help them.

♪ As far as the academic side of it, I was always... it always came really easy to me.

I was... most of the time when I was growing up, I was the smartest kid in class.

I wanted to study screenwriting and go to film school.

I applied for a full-ride scholarship, and if I had gotten it, I would have gone to the University of Southern California, because I did get accepted there.

I didn't get the scholarship, so I started kind of thinking smaller.

But I ended up not pursuing it because I didn't want to kind of feel the pressure of... um, people needing to, to like my work in order to really make a living and support myself.

That's why I chose to, to really not pursue that path.

- Where are you working at?

I work for the post office; I'm a mailman.

I started... stopped thinking about, like, what other people had told me was the best path for me.

I started thinking about what I wanted my path to be.

I kind of came to the conclusion that college was not the best choice for me.

♪ When I told my mom that I wasn't going back to school, it was hard, because I knew that, I knew she was going to be disappointed.

And I knew that it would be hard for her to understand that that wouldn't be the right path for me; it wouldn't be the right road.

♪ Since I was born here and I've never even been to Mexico, there's definitely, like, a big distance between the, the life that I know and the life that my parents knew.

I think I would definitely want to go to Mexico one day, but go there with my parents.

And that's definitely difficult to do, considering their legal status.

It would make it easier to, to relate to them to, to kind of see it in person and see, like, where they grew up and, and where they had their hardships and why they wanted to leave.

And, yeah, I would like to go to Mexico one day.

Um...

But it's hard.

Frustrated in explaining is the fact that people... people ask me, "Well, why don't you just become a citizen?"

And that, like, that boils my blood.

Because I'm like... - I'm like, "Oh, my God, I had no idea.

You're so right."

People think that there's a really long line to get your citizenship, when really there's no line that I could get behind, because I would have already gotten in line.

But there is no line.

♪ When the president had recently taken away DACA, I kind of just didn't know where my future stood.

It was hard, because I didn't know what was going to happen after graduation.

I didn't know what my life was going to be like.

So I kind of just wanted to give up, I was very disillusioned.

♪ I, I did always know that I was undocumented, but I never really knew what it meant until I got into high school, and people were getting summer jobs and people were getting their licenses.

A lot of my peers are able to get federal financial aid, and a lot of my peers are able to get loans and to rely on loans, and I'm not able to do that.

So I have to...

I can't just have a backup plan; I have to have one plan and stick with it.

The only problem that I have currently is that when I graduate, my DACA will have been expired for two months, and I don't know what that means for me.

And I don't think I will know until the time comes.

I try not to think about it.

It's hard.

Sorry, I get... (sniffs) I ended up enrolling for nursing, so I've been in nursing school, taking my pre-reqs.

Now I'm actually in nursing school, and I got a job at Children's Hospital.

♪ DOM ÍNGUEZ: As they left that night, I realized that the paths after high school for these first-generation Americans were unpredictable, and their studies could only partially prepare them for what the world would bring.

I also realized that they had enormous strength.

and what endured was their connections.

Connections to families living somewhere in between; connections to an unknown past; and connections to an uncertain future.

And it is these connections that will guide them through their next turn.

♪ MARTIN: Next, we're presenting a short that wonders, should all high school students go directly to college, or are there other choices we may offer them?

Filmmaker Dez Hernández has titled the piece, "Aim to Leap."

And, again, we'll let the filmmaker introduce himself and his film.

♪ My name is Dez Hernández.

I'm a filmmaker, producer originally from Miami, Florida.

That's perfect, that looks great.

(voiceover): Right after high school I signed up for whatever college classes me and my friends decided were going to be fun.

And we spent about a year just wasting time and not doing anything valuable.

I sort of didn't have a clear direction in mind, and so, I finally realized that and focused myself and change directions.

♪ Whoever is shooting low, try to get the wheels when they stop too.

A lot of students are sort of just rushed into college and don't understand what they're going to study, or even what college they should be going to.

There's a disconnect between what an 18-year-old senior does and what an 18-year-old college freshman is expected to do.

♪ The big idea is that you have those service years, and making sure kids are ready for, for college once they graduate high school.

So we're spending some time with this program based in Atlanta, Georgia.

It's called Leap Year.

They identify students who have a really good chance at being successful in college and in life but are missing a sort of critical component to their education to really make them sort of stand out and be where they need to be.

They work with the students 20 hours a week developing these skills, whether it's writing research papers, identifying what they want their majors to be in college and everything that that entails.

I knew I didn't want to go to school, like, right after high school, so I wanted to sign up for Leap Year.

HERN ÁNDEZ: One of the Leap Year fellows, Tiayana, has always really wanted to be a nurse, and it was always her, her dream since she was a kid and, you know, was working towards that when she got into the Leap Year program.

About a short time into the program, she started doing research for it and was watching YouTube videos of some of the procedures she would have to do, and when she saw the sight of blood, she fainted.

You know, I'm glad she figured that out now rather than two years into her nursing degree.

♪ High school graduation is a very important step, but it's only one step on the way to success.

And whether the next step is college or whether it's an internship or whether it's just figuring out what you want to do professionally, being able to see examples of people who have been in your position and have figured things out might open the eyes of somebody else who's in that situation.

There is opportunities out there that might be outside of what you've always heard.

Scene, cut.

Good job, everybody!

♪ SAM: I remember when I first started teaching seven years ago I was getting my hair cut on the other side of the city.

And the barber asks me what my deal is, where I'm from, I mentioned that I just moved to Atlanta because I got a job teaching at Towers High School.

And I'm looking in the mirror and he spins me around to look him in the face.

And he says, "You're teaching at Towers?

You don't want to teach at Towers."

♪ The fact that we have such different circumstances within the public education system in the same country... is appalling.

And it just didn't sit well with me.

These were bright kids.

I was expecting that they were going to continue on to college or continue on to some sort of post-secondary training.

But I saw them continuing on to minimum-wage jobs.

Because they didn't see what examples were out there for them, they didn't see the opportunities that existed.

♪ School counselors are incredibly overworked.

There just often isn't time to help kids make it to and through college.

♪ My kids just didn't know what was out there.

So we took them on a college trip to visit eight schools in five days over spring break.

MICHAEL: I think the students that it helps the most are the students who feel like, like me, they feel like they want to go to college, they know they want to go to college it's just figuring out where.

I want to major in physics with a minor in philosophy possibly, because some of my idols are, like, Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.

♪ SAM: The graduation rate here has steadily climbed in recent years I think in part, as a result of students seeing high school as just checking a box on the way to the ultimate goal.

College Aim students are now on almost 100 campuses across the country, and that's been really wonderful to see.

For me, going to college wasn't just this thing.

I needed it, because we didn't have anything.

When we moved to America, my dad had zero dollars.

It wasn't a game for me, and it shouldn't be a game for any of you all.

If you think you can do it, you most definitely can.

But if you think you can't, then what's going to happen?

You can't.

SAM: To see Jody graduating magna cum laude from Spelman but able to relate that much more with our students is incredible.

♪ There's some serious progress here at Towers, but there are so many kids who I work with on a daily basis who could use another year, who could use a little bit more time because, quite frankly, the public education system isn't preparing kids to be successful at the next level.

And I look at the circumstances that a lot of my kids kind of thrive through, and they're asked to do so much more.

During the school day, they're taking a few A.P.

classes, they're working really hard, and they're trying to learn and then they leave school and then they go to a job where they work until midnight.

and then they get home, and they have to do their homework.

And then they wake up four hours later, and they do it all over again.

I have a number of kids who are living those types of lives on a daily basis and I think, "How are you possibly keeping this up?"

♪ Some sort of mental health break to gain some sense of stability would be really valuable.

AMBER: The academic piece of college is important, right?

Making sure that we got them prepared for the emotional side, but that leadership piece is important.

- It's really cool you're giving students opportunities to then take that to the next level.

So not just, "What do I need to do to get in?"

but "What do I need to do to be successful once I'm there?"

♪ When I tell folks that I run a gap year program, usually the first response is, "Oh, so do they go off to Europe and kind of, like..." you know?

Because in America we think of gap years as something for privileged folks to, kind of have a year to hang out and have fun before you have to go to the real world, right?

So for a long time, gap years have been out of reach for a lot of students who really could get the most value of that.

♪ We know that first-gen and low-income students are less prepared for college.

So then why is the narrative seamless enrollment?

Why don't we give them the opportunity to be prepared when they go to college?

♪ Most students don't know what they want to do after high school yet.

Until like... probably when they get to, like, the end of senior year, and now they're trying to figure out what are you going to do.

I knew I didn't want to go to school like right after high school, so I wanted to take a break and just kind of do school, but not really... And also help me with getting into college.

♪ AMBER: At Leap Year, we take the hard road, because going to college is hard by itself, going to college as a first-gen student or coming from a low-income community is even harder, right?

And I think that we do students a disservice when we're not really honest and really clear about that.

I network with people around the world.

Like mappers, coders... and admins who want to create games and stuff.

Being active is important too.

Making sure that you're actively, consistently working towards your goal, right?

Not just, like, one day a week, right, but every day.

For the first 18 years of your life its a lot of folks kind of telling you what you need to do and figuring out how to solve problems for you.

And the leadership opportunities that community service provides gives students a chance to actually know that, "Okay, this is going to be better because of me."

So they're going to spend 20 hours a week doing the college readiness work, and also 20 hours a week of community service as elementary school reading coaches.

When I'm volunteering, I believe that it helps people, like, know that someone cares about them and someone cares about the situation they're in.

As we working for our scholarships, and as we're working to get into college we're also learning skills of our own, our self story.

AMBER: It's just super empowering to have students realize that it doesn't have to be the world acting on them, right?

They can have major influence and impact in the world.

♪ Our low-income and first-gen students also deserve the opportunity to have all of the resources that they need to be successful in college.

And if their parents can't provide that, at least Leap Year can try to fill in some of those gaps.

♪ SAM: An extra year where they have intense, close conversations around the academic preparation, the financial preparation, social preparation, the servant leadership that's necessary to be successful in this world is absolutely incredible.

I wish I could send every student through a program like that.

AMBER: I think if every high school graduate did a year service across the country our entire country would look stronger as a result of it.

I would love to see a mandatory year, or years even, of service.

AMBER: So many more students would have the opportunity to go to school prepared and go to school as a stronger leader.

So I think, you know, ten, 15 years later we would be looking at a different country.

♪ MARTIN: The young people in these films have all faced, and are still facing, choices that matter enormously to their future lives and to their families.

For more of the "Beyond Graduation" shorts, and for more interviews with the filmmakers, visit us at worldchannel.org.

♪ Funding for this program was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of American Graduate: Getting to Work, a public media initiative to help communities prepare all students for success in school and careers.

Additional support has been provided by the Wyncote Foundation.

♪ ♪