Providence Journal
Central Falls High Dropout Tells of Going From Jail to Yale
By Donita Naylor, Journal Staff Writer
April 4, 2014
CENTRAL FALLS — Not many dropouts can come back to speak at their old high school and begin the assembly by playing a video from the “Today” show telling how they went “from Jail to Yale.”
Andres Idarraga did.The segment showed a 6-by-9-foot cell at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston, and showed Idarraga remembering when “a day seems like a year.”
But from his cell he took classes from the Community College of Rhode Island, eventually getting accepted at URI. He was then released from prison. Then he was accepted at Brown, then Yale University Law School, where he earned his law degree in 2011.
The “Today” segment was aired in September 2008, after Idarraga was accepted at Yale.
Now he’s a lawyer for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where, the firm says, his main area of practice is complex litigation at the state and federal levels. He is married and has a four-month-old daughter.
“You have to sometimes have unrealistic goals,” he says in the video.
Getting an education is like reading a book, he says: “You read the first page, then move on to the second page.”
The way to achieve a goal is by “small, purposeful, consistent, disciplined steps.”
Idarraga, 36, addressed two assemblies Friday afternoon. For the second presentation, the freshman class was grouped with the senior class, which principal Joshua Laplante said was on purpose, for “our graduates to be modeling for our future leaders of Central Falls High School.”
Idarraga told the students that speaking at Central Falls “is very special to me, because as I look at you I think about the years 1992-1993 when I was walking these hallways and I was thinking what I was going to do with my life.”
“Even though I was a good student, I could not connect any dream to an action plan for getting there. That is the most critical thing you can do.”
His grades plummeted in the second half of his junior year, and he eventually dropped out. When he was 20, he pleaded no contest to drug dealing, gun possession and an attempt to bribe a state trooper. He served six years and four months. Guidance counselor Carmen Ruiz, who graduated from Central Falls, knew his story and invited him to speak.
Tough circumstances make it more imperative that you define your dream, he told the students, “Sometimes it is quite literally a life-or-death question.”
He said his life changed at age 24, in prison, when he read “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. He learned that “The people who have the power to define have power over their own life. One of the most important things to do is to every day think about ‘Am I defining myself or am I letting people define me? Or, am I just passively going through life?’”
He said the “gulf between a dream and making that dream reality is huge. It is huge.”
The way to bridge that gulf is a very meticulous game plan, “a very purposeful step by step. What is it that you are going to do to get there?”
He got an A in his first community college course in prison.
He began tutoring GED classes.
“I loved being in front of a classroom. I loved teaching. I began seeing myself as an educator. I began to apply to colleges from that prison cell. I wasn’t going to let the place define me.”
He told his attentive audience: “Be very, very vigilant about the choices that you make, about what it is that you choose you spend your time on, because all this will come back in spades.”
One student wanted to know how to discover what you want to do.
His answer, “Think about, what is it that you do on your spare time.” He corrected himself. “What is it productive that you do on your spare time?”
When asked about mentors, he said he cut out a lot of stories from newspapers and took them “very, very, very personally.” Reading about people who succeeded, he said, caused him to ask:
“Why not me? They have 24 hours a day like I get 24 hours a day. When they pick up a book, do they do anything different with it than I do? It’s not like they get secret words that I don’t get that allows them to be more successful than me. They get the same stuff. I can do the same exact thing.”
He got enthusiastic applause when he congratulated the seniors and wished them the best.
“If you’re already doing the right thing, keep doing it.”