It’s not so much the cards we are dealt as how we play the hand.
On the morning of Thursday, the seventh of June, 2012, in the gymnasium of Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, approximately ten miles southwest of the town of Lawndale in northern Cleveland County, an eighteen-year-old graduating senior named Ashley Dawn Loggins walked across the stage to receive her diploma from Burns High School, where she had completed three Advanced Placement courses, an honors English course, and three years of consistent A and A-minus grades while working approximately twenty hours per week as a part-time custodian on the same school grounds. She had been admitted, four months earlier, to the entering class of two thousand sixteen of Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was, by the documented institutional records of Burns High School, the first student in the school’s history to be admitted to Harvard.
Dawn Loggins had been born in 1993 or 1994 and had been raised in Cleveland County and adjacent rural areas of western North Carolina by her mother and stepfather. The household had been characterized by serial economic instability and repeated relocations between rental properties and squatting arrangements. By Dawn Loggins’s documented later accounts in interviews with the Cable News Network, the American Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and the Seattle Times, the household at various periods of her childhood had lacked electricity, lacked running water, had been infested with cockroaches, and had been heated only by a wood-burning cook stove.
She and her older brother Shane had walked approximately twenty minutes each direction to a public park in their town of residence to fill water jugs at the public bathroom spigots, in periods when their household’s water service had been disconnected. She and her brother had performed their schoolwork by candlelight on evenings when the household’s electricity had been disconnected. She had, in middle school, often gone several days at a time without bathing.
By the time Dawn Loggins enrolled at Burns High School in Lawndale in March of 2010 at the midpoint of her sophomore year, she had attended four different high schools and had missed an academic year of instruction. Her guidance counselor at Burns High School, Robyn Putnam, identified her academic potential within several weeks of her enrollment. Putnam enrolled Dawn Loggins in remedial-credit courses to recover the missed academic year and advocated for her admission to a series of school extracurricular activities including the photography club, the rock climbing club, and the Spanish club, of all three of which Dawn Loggins was elected president during her junior year.
In the summer of 2011, Dawn Loggins was selected for the Governor’s School of North Carolina — a six-week residential summer program for academically gifted secondary students hosted that year at Meredith College in Raleigh. Robyn Putnam drove Dawn Loggins the approximately two hundred miles from Lawndale to Raleigh to deliver her to the program and purchased the personal clothing and supplies that the program required.
Near the conclusion of the six-week program, Dawn Loggins attempted to telephone her family residence in Lawndale. The household telephone service had been disconnected. When she returned to Lawndale at the program’s conclusion, the household was empty. Her brother Shane had relocated to friends’ homes in nearby Hickory. Her grandmother had been transferred to a local homeless shelter. Her parents had relocated to Tennessee without leaving a forwarding address or contact information. She subsequently learned, several months later, that they had decided to remain in Tennessee permanently. Dawn Loggins was seventeen years old.
She elected, in consultation with Robyn Putnam, to remain at Burns High School to complete her senior year rather than to relocate to Tennessee or to enter the North Carolina Department of Social Services foster care system. Sheryl Kolton, a custodian and bus driver for the Burns Middle School and the mother of one of Dawn Loggins’s high school friends, had met Dawn Loggins only briefly prior to the autumn of 2011, provided her with a permanent residence for the duration of her senior year. The arrangement had been originally proposed by Sheryl Kolton’s daughter, who had told her mother that Dawn Loggins had been couch-surfing among the homes of her high school friends since August of 2011 and that the arrangement was not sustainable for the senior academic year. Sheryl Kolton subsequently agreed to receive Dawn Loggins on a permanent basis through her June 2012 graduation.
Other Burns High School staff contributed to her expenses for clothing, medical care, and dental appointments. Dawn Loggins obtained, through a school workforce program, a part-time custodial position at Burns High School itself — beginning at six in the morning, two hours before her classes commenced at seven-forty.
During her senior year, Dawn Loggins maintained a three-point-nine grade point average across three Advanced Placement courses, an honors English course, and several other classes. She scored two thousand one hundred and ten on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In December of 2011, on the recommendation of her history teacher Larry Gardner and a community volunteer named Carol Rose, she submitted her fifth college application — to Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The four previous applications had been to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, Davidson College, and Warren Wilson College. All four of the in-state applications had been accepted.
The Harvard admissions decision arrived at Burns High School in March of 2012 in a small envelope. Dawn Loggins was admitted to the Harvard College entering class of two thousand sixteen. The university subsequently confirmed that her financial aid package would cover the entirety of her tuition, room, board, and supplemental expenses for all four years of her undergraduate enrollment. Her brother Shane was awarded a full scholarship to Berea College in Kentucky for the same academic year.
Dawn Loggins graduated from Burns High School on the seventh of June, 2012. She enrolled at Harvard College that autumn.
