How uplifting to read of a homeless high school student graduating with honors. How sad that it's so rare as to be national news. But, every hopeful breath nourishes each of us.
original link: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-homeless1307may13,0,3281112.story
Homeless and learning-disabled, Edgewater High School senior Daniel Lazzatti becomes a model student.
May 13, 2007
Daniel Lazzatti's obsession with dragons both haunts him and helps him fight the triple beasts of poverty, homelessness and a learning disability.
In his dreams, winged dragons swoop from the sky to rescue him from the backyard shed he sleeps in.
Other dragons inside him rage against what he does not have when he wakes up each morning: an intact family, clothes, quick wit, a home.
But Daniel is winning this battle.
The boy who had every reason to give up on his life has instead climbed out of exceptional-education classes at Edgewater High School, earned a regular diploma and won a full college scholarship.
Others see unexpected success and bright hope; Daniel sees survival.
"He's phenomenal, and he doesn't know it," said Jennifer Eubanks, a specialist at Edgewater who helped boost Daniel's career.
Daniel just shrugs.
"I want more than to be just-over broke," the soon-to-graduate senior said.
Daniel is a loner, a quiet youth people love, tall and golden amid a gray, worn-out neighborhood.
No one prods 18-year-old Daniel awake at dawn so he can get to Edgewater High on time. It takes him 25 minutes to cruise to College Park on a cobbled-together silver mountain bike, squeezing his 6-foot-4-inch body onto the bike's 24-inch frame. Sometimes he walks an hour. Still, he has near-perfect attendance and a 3.7 grade-point average.
He carries his "main notebook" wherever he goes, a kind of planner that makes up for the mental organization his learning disability scrambles. Daniel looks forward each day to his computer and math classes because numbers don't change. There are no surprises. Words sometimes jumble on the page and spell out emotions he would rather hide.
He said he has to take time to think things through: "I just can't do things like normal people."
Daniel lives in a shed on Loren Avenue, behind the home of Sondra Allen, a woman who raised three boys alone and takes in all kinds of strays: pit bulls, alley cats, transient women. The neighborhood, Home Acres, is a purgatory of ramshackle houses where the residents wait for a developer to win county approval to raze the neighborhood and replace it with new homes, shops and parks.
Daniel's old house is gone, bulldozed by the developer who rid the area of many homes with problematic septic fields a few years ago.
He isn't sure where his mother, Marcia, is. His older brother, Joseph, lives in Lake County with a new wife and in-laws. Daniel's father, Alfred, lives in a tent nearby. The elder Lazzatti said he uses crack cocaine.
At night, after long shifts at Burger King, Daniel slips through Allen's fence to what he calls "the pool house," a vine-covered shed beyond an empty pool. Allen offered to let him sleep on the floor in her house, four doors down from where he once lived, but he said he volunteered to live in the shed.
The windows are boarded up and cobwebs hang from the rafters, but he has neatly ferreted items left from the old house into the shed: a bed, two dressers, a desk, a rickety armoire, crates of mementos and a shopping cart of clothes. He keeps a menagerie of dragon figurines by the door.
Daniel studies his English texts and dragon articles under a utility light. He has just enough power to play video games on an XBox 360 that he hooked up to a faux-wood-paneled Montgomery Ward TV with push-button channels. It took him a year to save up for the console.
At night, the rustlings outside his thin door sometimes startle him awake. Then they go away.
Daniel had a good life as a child. He had a mom, a dad and a brother in a three-bedroom house with a backyard. Daniel had a "Keep Out" sign on his door. Marcia Lazzatti found jobs through a labor hall. Alfred Lazzatti worked as an Orlando code-enforcement officer.
The dragons came when Daniel was in fifth grade, after strong storms destroyed a storage shed behind the old house.
The family had fun at first, burning broken boards and downed tree limbs, and roasting marshmallows over the bonfire.
But Daniel knew back then that bills went unpaid. He remembers the family getting food stamps. He remembers, too, that when the insurance company reimbursed the family for its losses, they bought a new TV, computer, tools and car parts. They later returned it all for cash.
The dragons that Daniel began to study, collect and dream about helped him build a wall to separate him from the crumbling world around him.
"I would wish that I was a dragon so I can fly away from all this," he wrote in a personal essay.
Things spiraled further out of control in 2003 after Daniel's mother left. Alfred Lazzatti sold his house to the development company and began renting it. Marcia Lazzatti got most of the money; Daniel's father got the boys.
Lazzatti, 57, said he had already cashed out his retirement fund to help his wife with legal troubles, so he often had to work odd jobs. Daniel said he loved helping his father scour work sites and city streets for scrap metal and aluminum cans to recycle.
In Daniel's mind, man and son toiled proudly in the heat to bring home dinner.
But by the fall of 2004, Lazzatti received his first eviction notice. He owed $1,200 in rent. On Dec. 9, 2004, one week before Daniel's birthday, police knocked on the door and told them to leave.
Father and son squatted in the near-empty house for a month more before parting ways.
Daniel strapped some things to his back and pushed the rest in a cart to Allen's house. He was 16.
By legal definition, Daniel is homeless, one of the 2,000 Orange County children in similar situations that the school district estimates it educates each day. Officials suspect 20 percent to 40 percent more go uncounted.
Daniel's case is unique, experts add, because most teens find someone to take them in. Few are on their own.
But Daniel persevered.
Though he had spent all of his school years in special-education classes, his teachers at Edgewater decided that the sophomore should be placed on a regular track -- a rarity in the education world.
By his junior year, he was still aiming for a special diploma for teens who can't quite meet the demands of high school. Teachers told him, however, that with two years of night- and summer-school classes, he still could get a regular diploma.
His father feared Daniel would fail, get fed up and quit. During one grueling summer science class, he nearly did.
"I just wanted one afternoon to myself," he said.
But quitting was just too easy, he said.
"Knowledge is power," he likes to say. "It will give me an easier life."
This month, he won a full scholarship to Mid Florida Tech to study computer-support services, as well as Edgewater's outstanding academic-achievement award. He passed on a career with the U.S. Marines out of deference to his father, who said he didn't want to see his son die in Iraq.
"Part of me wants to spread my wings and fly," Daniel said. But part fears the unknown.
Daniel calls his success "an accident." Eubanks, one of his Edgewater mentors, said he was simply too smart. "How about 'remarkable?' " she said.
Sometimes Lazzatti and Daniel bump into each other on the street. Sometimes they sit under a tree and study. Sometimes Daniel gives his father a few bucks. Sometimes Lazzatti knocks on the shed door in the early morning. Tell me, son, about your day, he says.
But Daniel likes his freedom.
"All Daniel's gotta do is whistle" to see him, Lazzatti said. "He didn't whistle too much."
Erika Hobbs can be reached at ehobbs@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-6226.
