Medical Lake High School: Jadyn Dane learned to advocate for herself
Even in the best of situations, navigating four years of high school can be a challenge. Adding in a turbulent home life can make it nearly impossible.
But that is what Medical Lake High School senior Jadyn Dane has accomplished, putting together a strong academic record even as she has bounced around, as she puts it, among several different homes. In that journey, she has learned to advocate for herself in a system whose pace can frequently be agonizingly slow.
In the last four years, Dane has lived with friends, in foster care, and at the Crisis Residential Center. She educated herself about her options even before she started high school, filing a Children in Need of Services petition almost four years ago, researching online and working with her guardian at the time. She is now living with a friend’s older sister.
“I just needed to get out,” she said. “I went through a depressed stage for a while, but when things got bad, it just reminded me why I needed to do this in the first place. I couldn’t make decisions to please anybody else. Sometimes it was tempting to give up, but I would remind myself that this wasn’t going to last forever.”
Dane was born in Oklahoma, then moved with her family to Missouri for several years. She, her mother, and two siblings moved to Washington when Dane was 9.
“My end goal was always to ensure that my little brother, who is 15 now, wouldn’t have to go through what I did,” she said, “that he would get the life he deserves.
“In the middle of all this, I started making friends, and in the last year I have a really good group of friends, and I’ve been able to be a normal teenager. I’ve been inspired to be myself and to do things for me, too. It’s been hard finding balance, to find everything that I need but also to stay connected with my brother. I spend as much time as I can with him, and we talk all the time.
“I go to school for five classes a day, I meditate, and I have a job. It works because I make myself a schedule which includes time for myself, my friends, and my brother. I lean on my friends and my counselor, and I know how to find outside resources when I need help.
“It’s been hard learning to depend on other people, because I don’t have much trust in others. That’s still a struggle that I work with, trying to find people that I can trust. But I know that I can’t change what happened yesterday, and that everything that happened in my past led me to where I am now, and I like where I am now. I know when I need an emotional tune-up, because sometimes I need that to keep myself moving forward.”
MLHS counselor Lisa Prewitt says school staff recognized right away that Dane was experiencing significant challenges in her life outside school, and that she would probably need additional support.
“It turned out that she didn’t need as much we thought,” Prewitt said. “Jadyn is independent, driven, and self-motivated, and she knows what her goals are. She has the ability to compartmentalize the different parts of her life and handle all of them effectively. On top of that, she often mentors and helps others in situations similar to hers.”
Dane will attend Western Washington University in the fall in pre-law, but her long-term goal is to combine her interests in business and culinary arts and to start her own business.