In moving graduation speech, Yale-bound student takes on doubters who said her class would ‘fail’ and ‘go to jail’

“This extraordinary speech was delivered a few weeks ago by Coral Ortiz, an 18-year-old who just received her diploma from James Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Conn. Hillhouse is the oldest public high school in New Haven. Nearly all of its approximately 1,000 students are minority, and more than half come from low-income families. Its preliminary 2017 graduation rate was reported as 91 percent, up from 80.4 percent in 2016, which was 25 percent higher than in 2012.”