Daniel Rubin: Ty McCloud's fight to graduate

This could be one of those uplifting pieces: A young West Philly woman makes it despite overwhelming odds - the loss of her grandmother and, less than a year later, the murder of her mother.

And still she manages to finish high school, win scholarships, and end her first year of college with A's and B's.

All of that is true.

But this could also be one of those depressing pieces: She runs through her money and has to drop out of school, becoming one of the 88,000 adults in this city who've left college without a degree.

The odds are greater she'll wind up in the second category; more Philadelphians have dropped out of college than graduated.

But I wouldn't bet against Tyzahvon McCloud. Next week, her aunt Dora is to drive her to Pottsville, where she's starting her sophomore year at Penn State's Schuylkill Campus. The 20-year-old is studying forensic science, and is to spend her last two years in State College.

That is, if she has the money.

She's covered for this fall, but doesn't have enough yet to pay for her housing next spring. Her room at school has been her first stable home since her mother was killed in January 2007.

McCloud was taken in by her boyfriend's mother after the murder. Her sister Kiara, 19, was taken in by

her

boyfriend's mother. For a year and a half, they've been splitting time with various relatives, holding it together, while finishing high school. This fall Kiara goes to Community College of Philadelphia, on scholarship.

Ty hopes her sister's transition is easier than her own. Her first semester at Penn State was rocky; she earned more C's than B's.

"It's a struggle going off to college not having your mother help you unpack," she said, sitting on the steps of her old high school on Monday. "It was a struggle to focus, to not think about her and the way that she died."

Tracey McCloud was shot by her live-in boyfriend in their Southwest Philadelphia home on Jan. 11, 2007. Ty's career path became clear to her while sitting at a detective's desk at the homicide bureau in the Roundhouse. She noticed a pile of folders, each representing an open murder investigation.

"I want to be the one to solve these cases," she recalls thinking.

Her second semester at Penn State, she pulled a 3.4, which is just shy of the dean's list. "I think I started to learn how to motivate myself," she says. It was Ty who'd found Penn State-Schuylkill, determining through its catalog that there she could major in forensics.

She was able to go off to college through federal and state grants as well as two one-year scholarships: from CORE Philly and one named for Daniel Faulkner, the felled Philadelphia police officer. The government will pay more this year, and family friends are working to find ways to make up the difference.

Ty was left with enough pocket money to buy some new clothes for school - "which is something I hadn't been able to do."

And this summer, she had some savings left from her high school job and the spending money granted to her for college, so she splurged on her sister's prom and graduation. "She wanted to wear Gucci," Ty said.

She helped pay for the $625 dress and had her sister's hair and nails done - "the girlie stuff."

"It kind of felt good to do it for her because I couldn't do it for myself."

Having that money now would make her life easier, Ty knows, particularly since she hasn't worked this summer - she talked of wanting to spend time with her sister before they separate.

"I'm struggling to take care of myself and my sister financially, and make sure we have what we need to continue in life," she says. "Just to have something that we can call our own."

This reminds me of my father's saying, when asked why he was spending so much on his children's education: "It's the only thing they can't take away from you."

Except in the case of Ty McCloud, even that's at risk.