From Drug Addict to Class Act (page 2 of 3)

Brenda and her son Mycole
Combs received a master's degree from Grand Canyon University.
Brenda Combs, who has long had a talent for music, often uses songs to teach concepts.
Photographed by Tom Spitz
Brenda with her son, Mycole, who was born five years after she kicked her drug habit.
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Courtesy Brenda Combs
Combs received a master's degree from Grand Canyon University last spring (above, with her son). She had come a long way from her days on the street (left, 1993).
javascript:void(0);
Courtesy Brenda Combs
Brenda Combs, who has long had a talent for music, often uses songs to teach concepts.
javascript:void(0);
Combs received a master's degree from Grand Canyon University.
Courtesy Brenda Combs
Combs received a master's degree from Grand Canyon University last spring (above, with her son). She had come a long way from her days on the street (left, 1993).
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I often think of how many people used to walk by her and say, ‘She’s a throwaway.’

An Addictive Personality

When Combs failed a drug test, violating probation, an attorney helped her avoid prison. She went through rehab, and the two wound up falling in love. Combs took a job as a hairdresser and began pursuing her dream of becoming a singer, playing nightclubs on weekends. But her relapses doomed the relationship, and she plummeted back into addiction.

In 1992 she drifted to Phoenix. One night, she was walking past a house where a raucous card game was in progress. A car screeched to a halt. “I remember hearing a clicking sound,” Combs says. “Then I saw guns come out of the window.” The target was a man she’d just asked for a cigarette. He threw himself on top of her, but both were wounded in the fusillade.

Combs’s left ankle was so thoroughly shattered that surgeons considered amputation. After months in hospitals, she returned to the streets, still on crutches.

“For me,” she says, “cocaine was the best medication.”

At StarShine Academy, one of Brenda Combs’s favorite motivational tools is a snow cone machine. She bought it a few years ago for her son, Mycole, now seven, but decided to share its bounty. Every Friday afternoon, she makes cones for each of the school’s 130 students. “They work hard all week,” she says. “They need a little reward.”

Combs labors tirelessly to help kids beat the odds. “Miss Brenda made me see that wherever you come from, you can do something great,” says Ricky Gomez, 14, who recently won a scholarship for gifted students to a Catholic high school. Combs, he says, steered him away from drugs and toward his dream of becoming an architect.

She makes regular home visits, even when the domicile is a dilapidated trailer. When a parent is in jail, Combs has been known to put up an extra child or two in her own small house. “She doesn’t expect any credit for it,” says Beth Brantley, who gave Combs her first teaching job seven years ago.

Because the school operates on a slim budget, Combs scours yard sales, spending part of her $35,000 salary on art supplies, educational games and AV equipment. She spends her evenings devising lesson plans—a math game involving pizza slices, an English unit in which students publish their own books. To make ends meet as a single mother, she holds down part-time jobs: choir director, online college instructor. And on Sundays, after church, she brings food, water and a bit of hope to those who live on the streets. “I want to go back and let them know, Hey, I made it,” she says. “If I can do it, you can too.”

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