Quincy's Irineo Castillo took the education road

QUINCY - Life had been kind of bumpy for Irineo Castillo, and in that context, some of the gang stuff he saw online and around his home in Tri-Cities started looking okay, even pretty good.

That was then, when Castillo was 13. Now he's 18 and graduates Friday from Quincy High School with the class of 2013. He got out of the gang, and one of the first steps in his reevaluation of where he was going was the skepticism of his teachers, he said.

When he was in eighth grade his family was having some troubles, he said, and he didn't have a lot of friends. So what he saw around town and read online about gangs just looked pretty glamorous.

Castillo started hanging out with the gang bangers. For a 13-year-old boy it was pretty impressive, he said. "It seemed cool to me," he said. The bangers had this deal, this idea, where they were successful when they made everybody who came around them look away, look down. "Like a king. Nobody looks at a king," Castillo said.

But there was a family emergency, and Castillo and his siblings moved to Quincy to live with his aunt. And that was where things started to change.

Not right away. When he entered Quincy High School he was still gang-banging, and school didn't seem that important. "First semester (of his freshman year) I did really bad," he said. So Quincy administrators offered him a choice. "It was either get transferred, or get expelled," he said.

The transfer offer was to High Tech High, the district's alternative high school. High Tech High didn't seem that difficult, so at first Castillo didn't take it that seriously either. But eventually the day came when he had to take it seriously, or maybe he wouldn't be in school at all, he said.

He remembered saying to himself, "Okay, I need to start coming to school," he said. He set the goal of getting out of the alternative school and back to Quincy High.

But his teachers were skeptical. Castillo said they told him, "No point, you shouldn't even try." That made him mad, and it also made him start thinking, he said.

His choice was to drop out, get a GED and enter the workforce, he said, or he could do the hard work of catching up. But it went deeper than that - he had to decide if he wanted to keep goofing off and gang-banging, or take school seriously. "Okay, do I really want to take this road, or that road?" he said.

The deciding factor was a cold hard look at his future. "If I kept gang-banging my life wouldn't be so good," he said. Maybe he'd be in jail, maybe he'd be dead, but even if he got out alive he would drive his family away, he said.

He looked back and saw more bad than good, he said, and he wanted that to be different going forward, and with the right choices he had a lot more years going forward.

He wanted to be someone his mom and sisters could be proud of, he said. So he was done with the gang.

He wasn't as tight with the gang-bangers in Quincy, he said, so it was a little easier to leave. "They kind of just saw me slowly move away," he said. It wasn't that easy with the guys back in Tri-Cities. To jump in the gang kids have to submit to a beating, and a beating is part of jumping out, he said.

Once he was done with gangs things started getting better, he said. "Sophomore year, that was the takeoff of the good," he said. He worked to catch up on his schoolwork, and will graduate with his class.

His plan is to attend Wenatchee Valley College and start studying business, he said. If that works he wants to transfer to Eastern Washington University and work on a business degree. But if he doesn't like that he has options, he said.

Other kids may find the gang life attractive, he said, and his advice would be to do what they think is right. They will have experiences that make it real, he said, and "those eventually will make you change."