By the time junior Gina Duarte walked through the doors of Shawnee Mission Northwest High School, she knew she was lost.

Students moved confidently through crowded hallways while she stared at room numbers that made no sense. 

Teachers pointed in directions she didn’t understand.

The bell rang.

The school seemed enormous.

Only two months ago, Duarte was living in Tangancicuaro, Mexico.

  At 10 a.m., Duarte sat in the Guadalajara Airport eating a Shake Shack burger. 

Suitcases stuffed with clothes, documents and pieces of the life they were leaving behind surrounded her. 

When the family’s first flight landed late in Dallas, they went through immigration, grabbed their luggage and hurried through security to reach their connecting flight. Missing it could have delayed everything. Hours later, they landed in Kansas City, where a father she hardly knew was waiting. Leaving everything behind in Mexico; lifelong friends, grandparents, and her old school Centro Escolar Juana de Asbaje, Preparatoria Jose Sixto Verduzco.

  Adjusting to life in Shawnee has come with its challenges, but Daurte feels safer here than she did in Mexico. Her former school environment was violent.

 “A friend of mine got her nose broken because someone decided it was a good idea to push her head into the desk,” Daurte said. 

One time, her friends almost got kidnapped on the way to Walmart, and there was bomb threats and shooting threats all the time.

 She also noted differences in how girls are treated, saying that in Mexico, teenage girls often feel uncomfortable because of unwanted attention from men.

 “Here is a safer environment for people to express themselves and dress however they like,” Duarte said. “Especially for girls.”

 Despite missing her friends and family back home, Duarte said the sense of safety and acceptance she has found in Shawnee has helped make the transition easier.

She had known for months the move was coming but she waited to tell many of her friends. She knew saying goodbye would be difficult.

Daurte was waiting for the “High School Musical” version of America. The ones she saw in “Spiderman, “Stranger Things,” “Mean Girls” and Nickelodeon TV series’. 

 Big schools with all the singing, yellow school buses, football games, school pride, meeting new people, and classic lunch of pizza and an apple.

But instead of finding a musical, she found real experiences. She learned how the credit system worked, E-Hall passes, using a Macbook. 

Outside of school, life is just as new.

After years of living apart from her dad, the entire family was together again. Her dad has worked in Shawnee 12 years before Daurte and her family moved. Her mother is working to transfer teaching credentials to the United States. Her younger sister is learning English. Daurte now has to take care of her sister before school while her parents work.

Despite the challenges, she has embraced the opportunities that come with her new home in Shawnee.  

She enjoys soccer and hopes to play on a club team and plans to play at Northwest in the spring. She enjoys AP American History with Mr. Wolfe, AP Language and Composition with Dr. Boren and AP Bio with Ms. Demke. She likes the college pathways and programs that can help her grow in her bilingual skills for a future career hopefully in medicine and developing her business, where she sells baked goods.

“When I first arrived, I was completely clueless,” Duarte said. “But now that I’ve been investigating more, I’ve been looking at my options.”

Now she walks through hallways where the numbers make sense. 

The teachers’ directions are no longer confusing.

The school that once felt enormous has become a place where she is building her future.