Gina Citao, 34, went back to school because of her son.
"I thought about my son. He's growing, and here I am and I don't have enough education. When he was 3 years old, he was already asking questions, and I was unable to answer some," she said.
Juggling a full-time job as a sales assistant at Nordstrom's; a full-time job as a single mother to her son Khalil, 7; and going to school isn't easy, she said. "School challenges me a lot."
But Citao said she doesn't want to find herself "an old woman who hasn't accomplished anything.
"The reason I went back to school is because of my son," she said. "He said, 'Mom, why did you go back to school?’ Then he said, 'Oh, I know why you went back to school, you wanted to help me, right?'
"He then said, 'Maybe you can support me someday to go to school,’" Citao said. "I said, 'That's right, too.'"
<i><b>Transitions</i></b>
Rosa Sanchez arrived in America at 16, still carrying bad memories of the Civil War in El Salvador. She attended JEB Stuart High School but dropped out.
Sanchez, who got married in 1995, has two sons, Derek, 8, and Jacob, 5. She works as a hostess at a restaurant in Herndon in addition to caring for her children and attending school.
She says difficulties with language and communicating were some of the problems she had adjusting to life in the United States.
"I couldn't understand people, and I felt very stupid because no one understood," Sanchez said, who enrolled at Pimmit Hills to go back and get her diploma. "School has helped me a lot."