A Life In Wes Moore's Life

The environment around you can cause you to think differently about yourself, your family, and maybe even your lifestyle. Wes Moore (the Rhodes Scholar) had a college educated mother and grandparents. Although they were poor, Wes's mother earned enough to send her son to private school and eventually used her social connections to send Wes to military school. Mary, the other Wes Moore's mother, was offered a Pell Grant into Johns Hopkins University; which gave her hope to get out of poverty and be the first person in her family to attend college. When Reagan Administration took over, it reduced the education budget in half, slashing the funds for Pell Grants, revoking Mary's scholarship. Without having attended college and raising two children by herself, Mary had to get multiple jobs, leaving Tony and Wes unsupervised most of the time.
Seeing that his mother and eldest brother dropped out of school, Wes felt that dropping out wasn't harmful in any way. Although Mary wanted to provide a good example by attending college, she didn't have the funds and had to drop out to provide for Wes. She tried her hardest to provide for him financially but not hard enough with the discipline a child needs growing up. Instead, Wes grew up wanting to be like his older brother Tony who told him, "If someone disrespects you, you send a message so fierce that they won't have the chance to do it again." Wes followed by this rule, which cause him to get into battles that could have been