UPDATE: Interested in Sho Boy’s show? He can be found at 100.7 and 105.7 FM from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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I am at Comstock Middle School for a guest speaker as part of the school’s newly adopted CREO program. The program – which focuses on exposing students, mostly Latino kids, to what it takes to graduate high school with an eye toward going to college — will be featured in a story in Saturday’s Press Democrat but check out a few advance bits here, now:
11:31: About 300 students are filing noisily into the Crusader gymnasium which as been cordoned off and split in two.
11:36: Monroe Elementary sixth graders are here too. As are five visiting principals from Shanghai.
11:38 “When they return, they will be talking about our schools and they will be talking about you,” Comstock Principal Bob Dahlstet tells the students of the Shanghai principals.
11:39 “You know that I believe in you, you know that your teachers believe in you, you know that your parents believe in you. You need to believe in yourselves,” Dahlstet said.
11:42: Edgar Sotelo, Sho Boy, from La Kalle radio in San Francisco is on, speaking to the students.
11:43: “Today I’m going to talk to you like adults, I’m going to be real,” he said. “I’m going to speak to you about real life.”
11:44: You guys have the power of choice, nobody can take that away from you,” he said. “You have the choice to be the victim or creator.”
11:45: “Regardless of whatever walls are put in front of me, I can jump over them,” he said. “Especially Latinos, we are really good at jumping walls, so I know we can do it.”
11:46 “You can be a problem or solution in society,” he said. “Unfortunately for our generation, society sees us as a problem. One person at a time you can change the statistics.”
11:48: “My dad went to school to third grade, my mom went to school to sixth grade because guess what, in Mexico you have to pay to go to school,” he said.
11:50: “Trust me, they want the best for you. You mean the world to them,” he said of students’ parents.
11:52: Sotelo tells the students about his brother and his father fighting in their living room: “They got into it verbally and physically.” The gym gets quiet very quickly. Sotelo has control over the group. They are listening intently.
11:55: “Every action you take, good or bad, doesn’t just affect you it affects your parents your family, your neighborhood, your school, your generation. If you are a Latino out there acting a fool, they’ll say all Latinos act like fools,” he said. “You represent so much more than yourself.”
11:56 Sotelo lived in a garage in a rough neighborhood in Southern California. “I couldn’t go outside and play,” he said of the rampant violence. “We are doing it to ourselves.”
11:57: “I have yet to get drunk or high in my life. I’m not saying that so you’ll say ‘Oh Sho Boy, he’s a saint.’ I’m just saying you don’t have to.”
11:58: Sotelo tells the students that it was sometimes hard to not drink, not smoke in junior high and high school. The guys who did were popular, but “now that guy has a beer belly, child support and a DUI. He rides around on a bike,” he said. “Do you want to be cool now or cool for the rest of your life?”
12:02 “Make sure you join AVID, it was my savior,” he said, which prompted an AVID teacher from Comstock to whoop. Sotelo asks the students to give her a round of applause.12:11: Soltelo tells a long story leading up to his 10th grade English teacher’s kicking him out of class one day. The teacher didn’t punish him, he said. Instead, she said: “I’m not going to waste my time on you because you are going to drop out of this class on your own. You aren’t going to make it.”
“It wasn’t because she was being a racist, it was because I was being a fool in her class,” he said.
“Regardless of who you are or where you come from you have 24 hours in the day. My question for you, how are you spending your 24 hours?”
12:16: “Do you want to depend on a man to survive?” The girls in the gym say “No.” “Ladies, it’s your choice. You have to go out and get an education,” he said.
12:17: “Guys, the girls you are dating, the girls you are talking to, they are somebody’s daughter,” he said.
12:18: “How do you want to represent your generation, your family, it’s your choice – be the problem or the solution,” he said.
12:19 Sotelo is taking questions.