Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com

Published - Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Black River Falls student fights back

By JOE ORSO | La Crosse Tribune

BLACK RIVER FALLS, Wis. — As Tracy Rowlee put it, 2004 just really wasn’t a good year.

It wasn’t just the awkward back brace she had to wear during her eighth-grade year because of scoliosis.

In March, cops raided her home and arrested her dad for selling drugs. A month later, that house burned down. In December, doctors put two metal rods in her back, causing her to miss a month and a half of school.

But she fought back and now, preparing to graduate in January, the 17-year-old Rowlee is Black River Falls High School’s Extra Effort Award winner.

Susan Leadholm, one of Rowlee’s guidance counselors at the school, said she respects Rowlee.

“She did not bury herself underneath a rug of embarrassment or self-pity,” Leadholm said. “Regardless of what her home life was at the time, she was going to overcome it.”

That didn’t come easy.

In a paper she wrote for school, Rowlee tells what it was like when the police came to arrest her dad.

At one point, pinned on the ground under an officer’s knee, she yelled, “Don’t point that gun at me, I’m only 13!”

After her dad received a sentence of five years in prison, and after her house burned down, Rowlee started staying out late and getting into trouble.

She failed three classes her freshman year.

“She definitely has a tough edge to her,” Leadholm said. “She’s not a prep, she’s not an athlete. She’s definitely an individual who doesn’t fit the common clique of high school.”

A turning point came one day on a visit to the Oshkosh prison, when

Rowlee’s dad asked her to look around and consider whether this was the life she wanted.

“Despite what he did he was always a good dad,” Rowlee said. “I wanted to make him proud like I used to.”

So, with the encouragement of guidance counselors, she did.

She stopped hanging out with certain people and told her friends she wanted to stay out of trouble.

By the end of her junior year she was a B student.

She has taken summer courses at Western Technical College’s Black River Falls campus, which will allow her to graduate early.

She now works 30 to 40 hours a week as a waitress and at Wal-Mart, babysits her sister’s 11/2-year-old twin boys two afternoons a week, and this weekend moved out of her mother’s home and into her own apartment.

She’s also working to raise money and coordinate construction of a sick room at the local animal shelter.

Leadholm said it’s important for Rowlee to be self-sufficient and in control of her life, not letting other’s circumstances determine her fate.

“All those situations have made her the strong individual she is now,” Leadholm said. “She’s realized she’s the one who needs to do the work and make the extra effort to be successful.”

After she graduates, Rowlee might need one more round of back surgery, then plans to get her associate degree in nursing at Western Technical College in La Crosse and her bachelor’s in nursing at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

“I like the idea of helping people,” she said. “My dream job is to be a surgical nurse, to be right there with the doctor operating on some little kid or elderly person or mom, getting somebody’s family member back to the way they were.”

Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.