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Editor’s note: This is one in a series of profiles of 2021 Lehigh Valley high school graduates 

As part of an assignment, Jakelyn Valenzuela wrote herself a letter in the ninth grade.

“I said, ‘Dear Jackie, if you get to graduating, if you’re there, you really accomplished something. You reached a dream,’ ” she said.

The Freedom High School student wrote that she wanted to go to Moravian College, that her favorite color is purple, and that going to college wasn’t just her dream, but also her mother’s dream. Her mother, Rosa Ulloa, grew up in Honduras and never went to school. It wasn’t until Valenzuela was 10 or so that her mother learned to read and write Spanish from a cook she worked with.

But she always taught her daughter that education was important.

“She always told me, ‘Jackie, you need to focus on your school, you need to go to school, you need to go to college,’ ” Valenzuela said. “She never had the opportunity. It was a dream she could never achieve because she never went to school in general. She inspired me, because she had to learn to read and write her own language and learn how to read and write English as well.”

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