Moanalua High counselor helps student turn her life around

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

Tara Viator shows off a composition she did for a school project while holding her daughter, Izabelle, 8 months. Tara overcame much adversity to earn her diploma and will be graduated from Moanalua High. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

In her escape from life as a high-schooler, there were nights Tara Viator slept at a bus stop, even in a graveyard, she says.

But today she is at the top of Moanalua High School outreach counselor Larry Park's list of Kids Who Made It.

Viator is clean and sober. She's married. She has a daughter who's almost 8 months old. And she turns 18 today, two days after she graduates from Moanalua High School in Central O'ahu.

Perhaps Viator's classmates won't remember her. She wasn't there keeping up with the honor-roll crowd. There were whole years Viator wasn't in school much at all.

"She flunked three times in the seventh grade," said her mother, Eva Malloy, who now lives with her daughter in Moanalua. "She flunked the eighth grade. It was a miracle she got out of there. I'm so proud of her."

Viator admits it would be easy for her classmates to regard her as just another one of the "drug kids." After all, some of them knew her face. She was the girl at raves and parties with the supply of crack cocaine and Ecstasy.

She credits the counselor for saving her. So does her mom, who lived in Seattle and lost track of her daughter when Viator was a runaway.

"He used to call us up and let us know what was going on, even when we were in Seattle," Malloy said. "If it wasn't for Mr. Park, this girl would not be graduating. I love that man."

For Park, this is part of the job. Every year, he looks forward to graduation day because he sees the students who used to fill his office now fill the line of caps and gowns.

"A lot of smiling faces," that's what graduation is about, he said.

Park had 13 other seniors this year in similar situations as Viator, about the same as most other public high schools across the state, he said. They were the ones directed to alternative schools, where teachers stayed late to help them find a way to make up their credits. Park has forged friendships with their parents as well, almost becoming a member of the family as he filled parents in on the secret lives of their teenagers.

Since Hawai'i schools began recording dropout rates in 1994, the rate has hovered between 17 and 18 percent. The state Department of Education has yet to meet the state and national goal of graduating 90 percent of students.

But more students who might otherwise have left school altogether are finishing school with completion certificates by choosing an "alternative route to completion," according to the latest annual report on school performance and improvement.

Since the state dropped competency tests as a graduation requirement in 2000, the nongraduation rate for seniors has been cut from more than 10 percent to 6.4 percent.

For every improvement in the statistics, counselors such as Park are behind the scenes. Gone are the days when high-school counselors concentrated on evaluating academic performance alone. Outreach counseling for Park is personal. It's about sex, drugs and alcohol, broken homes and patching up lives.

His mission has evolved into helping kids change their attitudes and at least make it through high school.

As for Viator, "she was a project," he says. But she turned her life around.

The milestones in Viator's life may have come out of sequence. Her yearbook won't be filled with friends calling her "2sweet 2B 4gotten." But she feels like a success story just the same.

She wants to go to Kapi'olani Community College and study to be a nurse. She already has the help of her extended family as she figures out how to raise her daughter as she grows up herself.

"A lot of kids tell me, 'I can't wait until I get out of high school so I can party,' " Viator said. "I'm just proud I'm not how I was before. I still feel like a kid, but I feel like I've been through a lot more than a lot of kids my age. I'm just proud I grew up and matured."

After watching Viator grow up in a hurry, that's enough to give Park pause and reason to seek out his success story's mother at graduation, just to see her smile back.

Reach Tanya Bricking at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8026.