Students at Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s alma mater in the Bronx, Blessed Sacrament School, which she attended from kindergarten through 8th grade, reflected on the school’s most famous alum in an article in the New York Times this week.
Recently, students have been talking about their future career goals, as the school’s most famous graduate could be the next Supreme Court justice. One student said she wanted to be a doctor, another a pharmacist, and a third was torn between the fields of science and aerospace. Branaijah Melvin, an 11-year-old who is one of 30 students attending summer school at Blessed Sacrament, imagines, “[Sotomayor] could have painted like me when she was my age.”
More than 40 years since Sonia Sotomayor graduated, Blessed Sacrament’s Bronx neighborhood is a place where graffiti and barbed wire have become commonplace and where students often come from public housing (with an average household income of $22,728).
As Judge Sotomayor faced congressional hearings this week, Branaijah had her own question about the former Blessed Sacrament student. Branajiah said, “Sometimes I think, ‘What if I’m sitting at the same desk she sat in?’”