Edwarda Parkinson is the class of 2024’s valedictorian at City on a Hill Charter School (COAH) in Roxbury. Her journey to this point did not come without challenges, and she recently met with The Reporter to talk about her high school experience and her aspirations going forward.

Parkinson moved to Dorchester from Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2021, joining her mother, to pursue better educational opportunities. She knew a little English, but mainly spoke Krio, Sierra Leone’s most widespread creole language. Because of this, and because of the pandemic’s lasting impact in the fall of 2021, her first year at COAH as a sophomore was especially challenging.

At the end of the year, she was failing English. But she worked hard at that deficit, and this year, she easily passed her AP Literature & Composition class. In addition, she said, English is now one of her favorite subjects.

Parkinson participated in numerous extracurriculars, from cheerleading for the basketball team to volunteering at a food pantry and a homeless shelter to participating in COAH’s stage productions of “The 39 Steps” and “From the Mouths of Monsters.”

“I joined the extracurriculars because I wanted to not think about schoolwork outside of school, and to just have fun and think about something else,” she said.

She and her family moved to Brockton in 2023, but Parkinson continued to attend COAH, adding a four-hour round trip commute to her daily schedule.

“In the morning, I’d wake up at 5 to take the 12 bus to Ashmont,” she said. “At Ashmont I took the 23 bus to come to school. Sometimes my mom would pick me up at school, but sometimes I took the bus home, and that’s where the traffic was.”

She said she dealt with the commute because, she said, “I didn’t want to go to another school and start all over again, get used to the teachers, and make new friends. It would be hard for my last year.”

She recently got to present her final City Project – a capstone course required of all graduating seniors at COAH that focuses on researching problems in their communities – to a panel of her teachers and administrators. It is about gun violence. She invited to talk about the issue and completed Boston-area service hours related to the problem.

“I chose this topic because we were supposed to find major things happening in the city of Boston,” she said. “It was a broad topic, but the people who were most affected by it were students, like with school shootings.”

City on a Hill announced in February that it would be closing its doors to new students at the end of the 2024-2025 school year, a result of its failure to show academic improvement after being placed on probation by the state in February 2020 amid dwindling enrollment.

Parkinson will start her freshman year this fall at Northeastern University, where, she said, she plans to study civil engineering or, maybe, prepare to go into law. Her stepfather is a civil engineer, she said, and last summer she interned with Sasaki and loved the work. But law is also a passion, and it had been since she was a child in Sierra Leone, when a neighbor went through a legal battle and her kids had to remain at home alone.

Parkinson’s graduation from COAH is next Monday (June 10) at the Strand Theatre and her parents, aunties, and “everybody” will be there to celebrate. But while she will be reflecting on her accomplishments, she had some advice for students who are new to the country like she once was, tasked with learning English and navigating American high school.

“Never give up, and make wise decisions when choosing friends, because high school has some good and bad friends,” she said. “Ask for help when you’re like, ‘I need help.’ And just be yourself.”