Yasmin Lacerda: “If I Want to Talk to a Teacher, I Don’t Have to Stand in a Long Line’

Yasmin Lacerda lost her father, Army Ranger Staff Sgt. Pedro Lacerda, when she was just 6. But there’s not a day when she doesn’t carry him, and his example, in her heart.

 “It’s definitely been harder as I’ve gotten older,” Yasmin, now 17, says of that early loss. The pain deepened when she began high school. “Wow,” she thought, “I’m doing my final years of school and he’s not going to see me graduate.”

Yasmin is determined to do her father — and mother, brother and herself — proud. She recently enrolled in the newly opened Lowcountry Acceleration Academy in North Charleston and is well on her way to earning her diploma — and moving on to a college scholarship that’s already got her name on it.

She’d like to become a teacher or counselor working with children who, like her, underwent an early trauma.

“Losing my dad so young, a lot of people really helped me,” she said. “I just want to be able to give other kids the same opportunity they gave me.”

By any measure, Yasmin is an impressive young women. She works full-time at the Maple Street Biscuit Company in Charleston to help cover family expenses. She serves as a motivational speaker at events sponsored by an organization dedicated to Gold Star children. She’d like to double up her courseload to graduate earlier than planned.

At her previous school, she says administrators and teachers seemed uninterested in helping her achieve her goals. “I felt really unsupported.”

She applied to Lowcountry at the urging of a guidance counselor and is having a dramatically better experience. On her first day, she says, life coach Jack Caulder quickly resolved issues in transferring credits from a school she had attended in California. English coach Bria Burke-Koskela has helped get a strong start in her English 4 class. And graduation candidate advocate Janell Reyes has cheered her at every step.

“Everyone has been incredibly helpful,” Yasmin said.

Her parents came to the United States from Brazil in 2003 and her father became a U.S. Army Ranger in 2005. A black belt in jiu-jitsu, Staff Sgt. Lacerda taught hand-to-hand combat to other Rangers. In 2010, he suffered an aneurysm at his base in Fort Benning, Georgia, and died.

Yasmin said she and her younger brother, Pedro, have received a great deal of support from groups dedicated to the children of soldiers. They began going to events sponsored by Gold Star Teen Adventures designed to help surviving children learn more about the daily lives, challenges and camaraderie of their late parents. They have opportunities to scuba dive, learn outdoor survival skills and perform first aid in the field.

Through such activities, the Gold Star kids bond with one another, “These kids … they’re just people you stick with through life,” she said.

She says the experience has left her and other youths better able to honor their fallen soldier parents.

“They taught us that there was so much more to our dads’ deaths than just sadness and grief,” she said. “It showed me that I don’t just have to be sad all the time, that I can be proud and happy.”

Yasmin speaks so powerfully about her experience that the organization invited her to be a motivational speaker. And her promise got the attention of another organization, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which is providing her a full-ride scholarship to college.

She’s applying to the University of Tampa and University of North Carolina-Wilmington in hopes of studying education and psychology. “I’m the first generation in my family to go to college.”

Yasmin said she loves the atmosphere at Lowcountry, which only recently opened and is already full of students — called “graduation candidates” or GCs to remind them of their goals — working hard in the relaxed, coffee shop atmosphere. The flexible schedule allows her to fit her coursework in with her job and Gold Star responsibilities. And she says the educators are always available and eager to help.

“If I want to talk to a teacher, I don’t have to stand in a long line of other students,” she said.