When Katonah resident Catalina Castellano, 22, a native of Colombia, first came to Putnam/Northern Westchester BOCES five years ago, she knew three words of English: yes, no, and thanks.

When she came back this week to visit her former teachers, she was totally fluent, with a 3.5 grade point average at Westchester Community College, where she’ll graduate in May with an associate’s degree and a Curriculum Award in visual arts, one of only two awarded each year. Now fluent in English and Spanish, she is on her way to conquering Italian.

She came back to BOCES she said because this is where her future began to blossom. In Colombia, schooling had stopped short for Catalina at age 10, when she was refused entrance to middle school because of her disability. Wheel-chair bound, she spent the next seven years confined to her home.

Once her parents immigrated to the United States in 1999 and 2000, they arranged for her to come here and resume her schooling. A member of John Jay High School’s class of 2004, Catalina spent all her school days on the BOCES Yorktown campus. Her first courses were English and Critical Skills, in which she learned filing and other office tasks. She went on to Floriculture, Business Technology, and Commercial Arts, all the while working toward a GED (General Educational Development) certificate.

Now she’s applied to SUNY Purchase to continue in graphic design and minor in modern languages, hoping to become fluent in Italian, French, and Arabic as well. Her career goals are to work for a magazine or a digital graphics corporation and, eventually, “to have my own business somehow combining all my knowledge … plus flower arranging, which I don’t do much anymore, but still love.”

Why did she come back to BOCES? “I came to visit my teachers” – Annmarie Santulli, Fernando Gomez, Elizabeth Bowler, Josephine Scala, and Sandra Garofalo. “I’m really grateful to them. This was where all my dreams started.”

(Report courtesy of Barbara Coats/BOCES.)