“You gotta have good grit!”
That’s how Brian Batchelor says he survived the turmoil of moving in and out of four foster homes and going to four different schools since the age of 8.
A tireless work ethic and resilience pushed Batchelor, 18, through myriad setbacks to become a valedictorian at Waialua High School in May. He will attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this month to study psychology and neurology, thanks to the teachers who helped him acquire scholarships and encouraged him along the way.
As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. At Waialua, he was nurtured by teachers, coaches and staff who believed in him.
“I can’t thank them enough,” Batchelor said.
In fact, it was his English teacher, Gregory Kamisato, and his wife, Joanne, who started fostering Batchelor at the end of his freshman year. Kamisato said his wife had urged him to bring the troubled teenager into their home. Her sudden death in November was yet another obstacle to overcome.
In a letter to the faculty on behalf of his late wife, Kamisato thanked several mentors by name for the specific contributions they made to Batchelor’s life.
“We appreciate all you have done for Brian, and his future looks bright. He is the poster child for what can happen when a group of caring adults decide a child needs their help and support,” the letter said.
They helped Batchelor “to heal and be a normal teenager,” taking part in sports, student government, homecoming celebrations and other activities, Kamisato wrote. He added that Waialua was the first school Batchelor had attended for longer than two years.
Batchelor said his mother homeschooled him until he was 8 because she didn’t believe in vaccinations, which made him ineligible for formal schooling until he entered the foster system. Because of problems at various homes, Batchelor returned three times to live at Hale Kipa, a nonprofit that serves at-risk youth. (Although he and his mom have been estranged for the past 10 years, she showed up at his graduation ceremony and they exchanged phone numbers.)
Moving into the Kamisato home was “a perfect place for me to heal from everything. Now, I only had to worry about school work,” he said, instead of struggling with the dynamics of the dysfunctional families he had lived with.
His academic performance had been up and down, depending on his living conditions, but with the stability and support provided by the Kamisatos, he excelled in his favorite subjects — math and science — and earned a 4.0 GPA to become one of a dozen Waialua class valedictorians.
And for the first time, he participated in after-school activities. The couple encouraged him to join the football, soccer and track teams.
When Batchelor first moved in with the Kamisatos and their son, he said it felt “weird.”
“The house was quiet, there were no screaming children, no loud music. … It was all super chill and quiet. They gave me privacy, they gave me independence in a sense, which is what I really liked,” he said.
The Kamisatos had previously fostered two children before he arrived — Kendra Okihiro, who became their hanai (informally adopted) daughter and is now a successful Realtor, and their son Jordan, whom they adopted as an infant.
Joanne Kamisato, whom he called “Aunty,” made Batchelor feel genuinely at home, providing a hot dinner when he came home late from team practices, baking cookies and including him in the chores as well as all the fun things the family did together.
When she died, “I just wanted to sit in my room, I didn’t want to go to school. I never felt grief before because I wasn’t able to stay long enough before in a home” to experience the loss of someone with whom he had developed a relationship, he said.
Batchelor said he felt himself slipping a little academically and didn’t play soccer that year, but he gradually got back on track because “it was what she would have wanted.”
His hard work and willingness to give 100% in athletics even when exhausted won the admiration of his football coach, Gary Wirtz, and his other coaches, even though he wasn’t the best athlete, Batchelor said. These qualities were also the bedrock of his academic achievements. He said he realized that doing well in high school was his “one chance in life” to make the most of all the opportunities he had and to give back to those who supported him.
Batchelor wants to become a psychologist or therapist because he’s fascinated by how the mind works, and he’s been helped a lot by therapists.
“When I grew up, going through all the stuff that I’ve been through — foster care and all that — I think I can help another person doing the same thing so they can become part of society in a successful way,” he said.
Whenever he faced a challenge, “I kept working hard and telling myself, keep your hopes up and not give up. All in all, you gotta have good grit!”
