For graduate, failure was the key to success

Dominguez was not necessarily headed for any college, let alone a good one. Even a high school diploma once seemed unlikely.

"I had stopped believing in me," said Dominguez, 18.

She believes now. On Sunday, Dominguez will accept her diploma from Prospect Hill Academy Charter School, a major milestone in her long, rocky journey from near-dropout to, she hopes, college standout and A-list lawyer.

For thousands of high school seniors across Massachusetts this spring, graduation is a mundane, almost perfunctory rite of passage. But that is not the story of Jackie Dominguez.

"The people in my family - my sister, my father, and my mother - have showed me how much an education matters," Dominguez wrote in her college essay.

But here is the twist: What they showed her about education were the dangers of not having one. As much as Dominguez loves her tight-knit Salvadoran family in Saugus, she realized in high school that she wanted to walk in different shoes.

She grew determined not to mirror the experience of her sister, Joselyn, who dropped out of school in 11th grade; of her father, who carved out a middle-class existence but was forced into bankruptcy by a bad real estate deal; and of her mother, who can get only low-wage jobs because she never finished high school.

"I have witnessed others' failures and mistakes," Dominguez wrote in her essay, which she called "Waking Up to Reality." "I am confident that my education and my determination are going to take me somewhere in life. Now I just need the opportunity to prove it."

It is an opportunity she nearly wrecked.

By her own account, Dominguez, a spunky, outspoken presence among her friends and classmates, was going nowhere her first two years of high school at Prospect Hill, whose upper school is housed in a former Catholic school complex off Central Square.

"I would get tests, and I would look at them like: 'You really think I'm going to do this? Because I don't know anything about this,' " she said in a recent interview at her school. "I'd put my name on it and pass it back."

"Loud, rebellious," said Christine Douglas, associate director of the upper school, describing the Dominguez she knew as a ninth- and 10-grader. "It was in your face every day: 'I hate it here, I'm miserable, and I'm going to make everyone else miserable.' "

"She is such a leader, a natural leader, that her peers would follow right along with her," Douglas continued. "She was not just self-sabotaging; she would sabotage an entire room full of kids."

Everything came to a crisis at the end of her sophomore year, when her teachers delivered troubling news: She was on the cusp of failing 10th grade.

"I walked out of the room crying," Dominguez said. "I was like, I can't do this. I can't fail 10th grade."

Thus began her slow plod back from the brink. She rescued her grades in summer school, then returned for junior year determined to make something of herself. She began studying, began caring. The new Jackie Dominguez was just as loud, just as attention-seeking, but to a different end.

"It became OK for her to be receiving attention, because she had a good answer or good contribution to make in class," Douglas said.

Asianna Milord, a 17-year-old classmate who has known Dominguez since third grade, said the shift was stark.

"I noticed that Jackie was serious about getting her work done," she said. "That's been a change, a dramatic change. She's on top of it all the time."

At the end of 11th grade, Dominguez was at a school awards ceremony, doing what she and her friends had often done at such events: pretending they were the recipients.

"We always joke around with each other," she said. "We'll be like: 'Best Student in the Whole World? Oh, you got that, you got that, that's yours, knowing that it's really not ours."

Then somebody called her name. She had won the award for most improved student.

"They were like, 'Dominguez,' and I was like, whoa," she said. "I was really, really happy."

Dominguez has managed to turn her school career around while working two jobs. This year, she has been putting in 40 hours a week, 10 at T.J. Maxx, 30 at the Cheesecake Factory. She works 12-hour shifts on both Saturdays and Sundays.

"I don't want to ask my mom to buy me shoes when I know she can't afford it," Dominguez said.

And she helps with family expenses. Her father, Jose, was working two jobs but recently lost one. He filed for bankruptcy May 4.

"You think you have this master plan already worked out for the future of your children," Jose Dominguez said. "But it didn't work out that way."

Indeed, what compelled Jackie Dominguez to change her ways was partly fear of not having a safety net.

"He didn't have something to fall back on, and I want to have something to fall back on," she said of her father.

And in her essay, Dominguez uses her sister, who was also a student at Prospect Hill, as a foil.

"For a long time, I believed that whatever decision she made I could follow and use her experience to help me," she wrote. "I watched my sister go downhill and wonder why she made such different choices."

Douglas said, "When she saw Joselyn get stuck the way she did, I think it scared her, and I think that's what made her decide, 'I'm not going to let that happen to myself.' "

Joselyn Dominguez did not return phone messages.

The two are close, and Jackie Dominguez now hopes she can be a role model both for her sister, who has begun working toward her equivalency diploma, and for her 17-year-old brother, Jose.

"You can see the spark in her face," their father said of Joselyn. "She's like: 'Wow, Jackelyn got into this, so I would really like to do something. I just don't want to stay behind.' "

The day last month that Dominguez found out she was taken off the waiting list and accepted at BC, she returned home to find the family's Yorkshire terrier decked out in a BC sweater. It was Joselyn's way of saying congratulations.

Dominguez is due on campus in a couple of weeks for a summer program, designed to smooth her transition to college. She allows that studying through the bulk of her summer is not ideal. But, in a measure of how much her outlook has changed, she is excited about being in the classroom.

When Dominguez tosses her cap in the air Sunday, she will do so with lots of hopes, some regrets, and a few fears, including how she is going to make college work financially. She and her family are focused on celebrating her hard-earned achievements.

"Money is not that great right now," her father said. "But I mean, we can manage somehow to do little things for her."

Dominguez knows that what she went through taught her invaluable lessons about self-reliance, overcoming adversity, and personal strength. She believes she had help, from God, above all, but she also now knows that there is something inside Jackie Dominguez that doesn't quit.

"If it's your future," she said, "take advantage of it."

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.