Mountain View: For Areya’nna Lucas, a hard road leads her toward optimism and a desire to serve

Mountain View Alternative High School senior Areya’nna Lucas had every reason in the book to quit school. Instead, she took a hard look at herself, buckled down and earned her diploma almost a full year early.

Just during the past four years, Lucas lost her older brother and mother and was the victim of ongoing bullying. She has had ongoing medical issues stemming from a traumatic brain injury suffered in an automobile accident when she was 6 years old. Her grandfather died when she was in sixth grade. Depression has also been an issue for her.

So how did she keep going?

“My counselor (Kelli Aiken) and my teachers pushed me, even when I was depressed and wanted to drop out,” she said. “They encouraged me and told me how proud of me they were, even when I wasn’t proud of myself. During my junior year, I discovered that I was further along in school than I had thought, and that helped me to work harder.

“I also knew that I didn’t want to go down my mom’s path. She was into drugs, especially after my brother died in a car accident at the beginning of my freshman year. He was her rock, and when he died she let go of everything. She died two years after that, and for a while my younger brother and I were homeless.

“I have tried to learn from my parents’ mistakes, because I think that everything in my past scares me and I don’t want to go back to that. I would think about where I could land if I stayed on the right path, and that I could succeed. But for a while I just wondered who was going to die next.”

Aiken said, “Areya’nna is an amazing young woman. She has persevered through devastating events that would derail most people. Her medical situation makes attending school difficult, but she came every day to complete all her coursework. She is a model for grit.”

Lucas had attended Rathdrum High School briefly before her brother’s death, but she was bullied and began acting out at school in reaction to that.

“I have no idea why I was bullied,” she said, “but I needed to take out my feelings somewhere and I started getting in trouble at school. That was when the principal thought that Mountain View would be a better choice.”

The transfer helped her to focus on moving forward, she said, and her grades improved. But then her mother died, and she moved three times in the next two years before landing with her aunt, where she helps care for her ailing grandmother.

“My future will start this fall,” she said. “I want to get a certificated nursing assistant license so that I am able to help other older people like my grandma. I want to serve people who are in senior care homes.

“I always thought of what I can do better,” she said. “I’ve been through a lot and I shut out lots of my friends after my brother and mom died, but I have a great support system in my family and my boyfriend.”