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Jun 11, 2003

"The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else." --e.e. cummings

Richmond High student Gustava Bennett-Burrus doesn't do the latest teen dance, the "shakey," and she doesn't carry a backpack with speakers blaring Eminem like the cool kids, but give her a break -- she's 97. It's been nearly nine decades since she dropped out of the fourth grade in a one-room school house in Boley, Okla., to pick cotton on her family's sharecrop farm. She's wished for a high school diploma ever since. She will finally get one when she takes the graduation stage on June 14.