By Senior Airman Crystal Housman
Nicholas Nygryn stands under the canopy of his family’s picnic tent March 16 and turns to his mother.
“Since when have I ever been a ‘pleasure in class’?” Nygryn asks with an expression and delivery that is equal parts excitement and surprise.
Moments earlier, the Buena Park teenager introduced one of his teachers from Sunburst Youth Challenge Academy to the twenty-or-so family members who joined him at Joint Forces Training Base, Los Alamitos, California, for the academy’s Class 23 Family Day.
His mother, Angie Bonilla, shakes her head and gives her son a bear hug.
“That was a first,” she says to her son, who is a high school junior and is carrying straight A’s for the first time he can remember.
Nygryn turned 17 about a week and a half earlier and is surrounded with birthday decorations. His family surprised him with an impromptu party at their tent, which is one of a couple hundred neatly arranged in rows across the academy campus.
“We’ve missed him so much,” Bonilla said. “I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep all night.”
Family Day marks the first time Nygryn has seen his family in ten weeks.
In early January, he and more than 200 other teens arrived at the base to begin personal transformations courtesy of the academy’s eighteen-month para-military program of residential and post-residential curriculum and mentoring. The program focuses on eight core components: leadership and followership, service to community, job skills, academic excellence, responsible citizenship, life coping skills, health and hygiene, and physical fitness.
Nygryn was mad, he said, when his mother dropped him off on intake day. But now he’s glad she did.
“I didn’t want to come,” he said of the voluntary program, “but now I realize she just wanted the best for me, and it’s making me better as the days progress. I’m happy here.”
Nygryn and his classmates are almost halfway through the academy’s five-and-a-half-month residential phase. Tonight, they’ll go back to their dorm rooms, tidy up the campus, hit the books and maybe write another letter home.
The cadets will each earn 65 high school credits – about a year’s worth of units — before they leave in June and many will receive their high school diplomas or equivalencies during the class’ graduation ceremony.
June is in the future. It’s not far away, but Nygryn says he never would’ve thought about it before.
“The present and the past is what I used to think of,” Nygryn said, “but now it’s success and the future,” Nygryn said.
Sunburst Youth Challenge Academy is one of three National Guard Youth ChalleNGe programs in California and is facilitated by the California Military Department’s Youth and Community Programs Task Force in partnership with the Orange County Department of Education. Sunburst, which is in its 11th year, has helped more than 3,500 at-risk Southern California teens reclaim their lives.