Student to attend Yale - a first for her high school

MINNEAPOLIS — At Hiawatha Collegiate High School, educators say 100% of seniors made post-secondary plans before graduating this year, whether military, trade school, or college.

It's tradition to celebrate those plans in the school auditorium.

"At Hiawatha, we pull out shirts and say where we're going," student Lillianna Smith explained. "And when I said, 'Yale,' the crowd went wild."

The high school is part of Hiawatha Academies, a network of tuition-free public charter schools in Minneapolis serving K-12 students. The district says Smith is the first in school history to be admitted to an Ivy League university. 

The 17-year-old says she got the news while at work.

"I saw the email pop up on my phone and I was like, 'You know what, maybe I'll wait until I get home,' but when I was in that break room, I was like, 'Nope, I'm going to open it,'" she said. "I was alone in the break room and I opened it and a video started playing of the Bulldogs."

She'll also be the first in her family to attend a 4-year university. She says her mom went to a 2-year college and her dad didn't attend any college.

"I told them I got in and my brother was like, 'What?' Like, 'No way,'" she said. "I remember my dad was pacing back and forth … I continued to tell them, like, 'I also got a full scholarship to Yale,' and at that point I could see tears in his eyes and it was just a really good experience for the whole family."

Dean of College and Community, Bryan Daly, says 96% of Hiawatha Collegiate graduates are first-generation college students.

"It just represents the progress we've been making as a network of schools," Daly said. "From freshman year to senior year, we really work on exposing students to college … We also provide counseling to our alumni as well. So part of my job is checking in on Lilly in the fall, making sure if she needs anything."

Last year, Hiawatha Academies even paid for Smith's participation in a summer program at Columbia University in New York.

"I had so much fun and I kind of felt like, 'Oh maybe I should go to an Ivy League,' and after I applied to Columbia, I was like, 'You know what? Let's just look at the list.' So I applied to Yale and Brown and UPenn," she said.

Among them, she solely got into Yale, where she plans to study Computing and the Arts. Smith says she had a 4.2 high school GPA, and her resume included student council, the National Honor Society, a club she and her friends founded called By the Students for the Students and an internship with Rise & Remember. Daly noted that she also excelled in the arts.

In fact, while she attends the New Haven, Connecticut school, her legacy in south Minneapolis will live on with a mural she and her classmates painted just down the block from her old high school.