Santiago Gavidia will walk across the Niceville High School graduation stage this spring and head to Northwest Florida State College in the fall, the result of years of support from his school, his family and a local tutoring center that helped him clear Florida’s final graduation hurdle.
- Gavidia, who moved to the United States during middle school, had taken Florida’s FAST Grade 10 English Language Arts exam 17 times without meeting the passing score required for graduation.
The test is adaptive, meaning early wrong answers push students into progressively harder territory — a format that can compound the challenge for students still building English proficiency.
Gavidia has been enrolled in Niceville High’s ESOL program since his freshman year in 2022, when he underwent entry-basis and level-determination testing and began working with the school’s ESOL contact, Izzy Norman. Like every ESOL student in Okaloosa County, Gavidia had an individualized ELL plan written each year outlining supports such as word-to-word dictionaries, directions in his native language, interpretation technology, and extended time for assignments and testing. Each of his classroom teachers received a copy of that plan.
ESOL students in the district are also placed in intensive reading classes. Underclassmen use Read 180, a district program with its own individualized growth plan and built-in progress monitoring. Upperclassmen shift to reading strategies and targeted preparation for standardized tests including the SAT, ACT and CLT.
Niceville High’s guidance department has long explored concordant scores — alternative test scores that can satisfy Florida’s graduation requirements — for students who have not yet passed the FAST. Counselors keep running lists of seniors who have not cleared graduation requirements and meet with them repeatedly, seeking out options along the way. The school administers a CLT each year, and students are encouraged to test until successful.
- For Gavidia, who had already attempted the PSAT, CLT and SAT, the ACT was the next logical step.
That’s when Niceville High reached out to Niceville Tutoring for help with ACT preparation.
“We collaborated with the school to suggest the ACT and provided the prep,” said Rebecca Beard, owner of Niceville Tutoring.
Two tutors, Theresa Morvay and Dalia Warda, teamed up to work with Gavidia over roughly six weeks. Morvay, a former Coast Guard officer and pilot, has spent more than a decade tutoring students across elementary, middle and high school and holds teaching certifications in elementary education, exceptional student education and art. Warda, originally from Colombia, holds an MBA and worked for a decade as a certified English-Spanish interpreter before moving into education, where she has taught PreK-12 subjects including Spanish, Latin and algebra.
Gavidia met the ACT benchmark needed to graduate.
- “English is not his first language,” Beard said. “He was really on track to not graduate at all this spring and was devastated about it.”
Gavidia said he cried tears of joy when he learned he had passed.
“Thank you so much for believing in me and helping me with everything related to this exam so I could graduate,” he wrote in a message to Morvay. “Honestly, I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you for your kindness, your patience, and above all, for the excellent education I received throughout this time.”
His parents, David Gavidia and Angela Chavarry, echoed that gratitude.
“Our family is deeply grateful to all of you for your dedication, work, and great support and care you have shown towards our son,” they said. “As he mentioned, ‘They are not teachers, they are truly angels.’ The goodness of their labor will remain forever in our family’s memory.”
Beard said the collaboration is exactly the working relationship Niceville Tutoring has with local schools. The center employs teachers who also work in area classrooms and runs test prep classes with school approval.
- “We get this overlap a lot, just because some kids in a classroom setting need that little bit of extra support,” Beard said.
Gavidia has been accepted to Northwest Florida State College, where he plans to pursue a degree in digital marketing.
“I literally heard him through my door talking to his parents and to Theresa and Dalia,” Beard said. “He was like, ‘I get to go to college now.’ Sometimes these little wins are what we need as humans — and I think this is the kind of win that sets him on the pathway to knowing he can do really big wins later.”
Niceville Tutoring offers academic support services for students of all ages. More information is available.
One Response
Heartwarming story of perseverance all the way around . So happy for this young man, and his family too.
Truly Angels are Everywhere.
He was blessed to have many on this journey….. may all continue within his college years & beyond. Sincerely, M. Clark