MUNOZ

CENTRAL FALLS — While her classmates got to sleep in on Saturdays, Jeiza Munoz was up early for math class and then English class as part of Rhode Island College’s Upward Bound program. During her summers, when friends mingled time off with jobs, she spent six weeks living at RIC studying subjects such as physics, calculus, English and a foreign language. She has been doing that since sophomore year and she says it has helped get her where she is today.

Munoz is Central Falls High School’s valedictorian for the Class of 2007. In a short while, she will graduate and head out for another summer of preparation for school, but this time it’s at Boston College where she begins her freshman year this fall.

“It’s something people expected but it’s still unbelievable. I actually made it. I always wanted it and worked for it. It’s so surreal for me,” she says.

Munoz says she has always kept her “eyes on the goal.” “I always joined clubs. I joined the basketball team. I made friends who motivated me. You have to have the right friends,” says the daughter of Milagros Rodriguez and Carlos Munoz.

“You have to keep your priorities straight” to succeed, she says. “If you have homework and you want to go out, you do your homework first,” she says. She balanced studying with playing for the high school basketball team, being the class vice president and working at the Ponderosa in South Attleboro. There are times she works from 4 until closing time, she says.

She wasn’t always the confident girl she appears to be. The Upward Bound program not only helped her academically because it prepared her for classes, but it also helped raise her self-esteem, she says. “At first when I started going to school I was really shy and kept to myself. I had low self-esteem. Over a year I exerted myself and have become open-minded. I learned how to be myself and not let people influence what I want to be and do,” she says.

She is undecided about what she wants to study in college but says it’s between working with children and forensic science. “I want to help troubled kids or adolescents, but I don’t want to be a teacher,” she says. “I always liked forensic science and problem-solving.”

Her love of working with children came when she joined the reading buddies program in 2005 and worked with elementary school children. The children would meet her at the high school library and read to her for a half-hour and then she would help them with their homework. “When I would have a stressful day at school I would go there and feel just happy to be there. I really want to work with kids. I like the whole atmosphere with them. They are so carefree they kind of make you feel carefree like themselves.”

She says she feels she will be successful if she can help one person. “To have an impact on one person, a child, an adolescent, through my life, that would make me happy to reach my goal,” she says.

Her parents inspired her to press ahead and be successful she said. “My father is always talking about the things that I can be and not settling for what life has to offer,” she says.

tpina@projo.com