RUSKIN — On school mornings, Fernanda Gonzalez uses the light from her phone to guide her along the desolate road to her bus stop in Wimauma.

Behind her is the mobile home her parents, immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, purchased after decades of farm labor that took them to a half-dozen states.

Ahead of her: a day at Lennard High, followed by classes at Hillsborough Community College just across the street, and — with a lot more work and a little good fortune — a future far beyond the fields.

Fernanda is part of an elite group of 15- and 16-year-old students who hope to graduate from Lennard in 2018 with two years of college under their belts. It's a highly demanding program with hurdles that can trip a student with no motivation or help. But she isn't doing any of this alone.

Tutors help her with math.

Friends join with her in study groups.

A charter school with a nurturing atmosphere and high expectations saw her through eighth grade.

A third-grade teacher gave so much homework she cried.

A fourth-grade teacher sparked her love of books with a movie bribe.

Older students who looked like her said to keep studying.

"They inspired me," said Fernanda, who is preparing for a career in pulmonary medicine, motivated by her own struggle with asthma. If she has to leave the state for a scholarship, that's fine.

"It's my future," she said, sitting outside her parents' mobile home, with her father listening approvingly.

"I love my family. But I'm also creating my future, and I have to do whatever it takes to get there."

• • •

The paths that led Fernanda and four friends to the Collegiate Academy at Lennard begin in cities and towns throughout Mexico — from its bustling capital to more obscure locales like Guerrero and Ixmiquilpan Hidalgo.

Janely Rodriguez's parents, who immigrated as children, met in Brandon, where her mother worked at her father's family's restaurant.

Emmanuel Valdez's father met his wife in Mexico, where he began his college education, ran out of money, moved north and ended up in construction.

David Chavez is the second of three children born to parents who make their living picking strawberries and tomatoes.

Esmeralda Martinez's father is in construction, and her mother is a farm worker in Ruskin, where they live most of the year. In the summer, they travel, like many farm families, to South Carolina. The parents work while their six kids attend summer school.

Most of the parents said they arrived in the United States decades ago and had their children here. But, while that timetable makes the students U.S. citizens, the adults' immigration situations vary. In some cases, as with others in their community, a lack of documentation limits the types of jobs they can find.

One by one, the five families found their way to the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, which operates two charter schools in Wimauma. As with district-run schools, RCMA enrolls the children without probing into immigration matters. The K-5 school opened in 2000. Fernanda's group was in the inaugural class of the middle school, which opened in 2012.

Launched in the infancy of the charter movement, RCMA sought to meet the specific needs of rural families who often travel for work and speak little English at home, and to prepare their children to participate fully in the U.S. economy.

The school's anything-is-possible message took root with Fernanda and her friends.

Emmanuel said he doesn't like to brag but acknowledged he got perfect and near-perfect scores on state math tests. He plans to become a neurologist.

Esmeralda, who enjoys drawing and dancing, has math skills on par with Emmanuel's. She wants to be a pediatrician.

David, who can be funny around his peers but reserved with strangers, has not chosen a career. He loves history, and his teachers say he excels at everything.

Janely is the closest thing the group has to a leader. She's the student chosen at Lennard to give tours to future Collegiate entrants and was the valedictorian of their eighth-grade class at RCMA. She wants to be an astrobiologist and an astrophysicist, and she has set her sights on an internship at NASA.

After that: "Trying to make, I guess, advances in technology as much as possible," she said. "Thinking beyond the here and now, and thinking about the future. Not just my future, but society and humanity."

• • •

Educators have long puzzled over what accounts for success in school. Parental support? Economic privilege? Or is there some indefinable quality that makes a child want to wrap their mind around grammar and multiplication tables and the laws of science?

Like a lot of successful charters, RCMA benefits from parents' loyalty. Teachers make home visits to all children in the lower grades. The school helps with legal matters and rides to the doctor. Students' records are tracked when they go out of state. During interviews with the five students, parents asked their kids, in Spanish, to state how grateful they were for the RCMA safety net.

The school also focuses on the very specific patterns of Spanish-speaking children.

Charlotte Bethany, the students' English teacher, combed through their essays, attuned to common mistakes — such as putting an "ed" at the end of all past tense verbs instead of using their irregular forms, like "threw" and "drew."

For Fernanda, there was a sense that if she encountered a barrier, a teacher would help her overcome it.

She was insecure about reading until fourth grade, when teacher Kathryn Shea offered to take students to the movies if they finished a series of Percy Jackson books and passed their comprehension tests.

"It ended up being 13 or 15 of us, and she was so surprised," Fernanda said. "And I think that's where it all started."

Today, she and Janely relax with novels by Rick Yancey, John Green and Markus Zusak.

Students say RCMA's enrollment of under 300 keeps the place feeling like a family. Teachers can spot a minor rift and step in before it escalates to a fight.

It's an atmosphere of so much peer support that Bethany couldn't even get a fourth-grade class to finish a math competition because a student couldn't do one of the problems.

"I would say a lot of our kids are like that," she said. "But (Fernanda's) class was especially so."

Principal Mark Haggett recalled a certain moment, on a field trip, that captured the feeling at RCMA.

"There were probably 30 kids on that bus," he said. "And somebody got out a bag of chips. And that bag of chips went around the whole bus."

When it came time for the first middle school graduation, "we decided that as a class, we were going to have a mariachi and include our culture as much as possible, because it is very important to us," Janely said.

The band played, but it was a bittersweet occasion.

"I was like literally crying, crying and crying," Emmanuel said. "I couldn't stop crying."

• • •

High schools use dual enrollment to help students get a jump-start on college. Community colleges like it because, with better-prepared students, they can lower their dropout rates.

In Hillsborough, the rigorous Collegiate program is offered at Lennard, Leto and Armwood high schools. It's a highly structured magnet program that can lead to an associate degree from Hillsborough Community College upon graduation.

The idea to steer RCMA graduates to the program came as Haggett was trying to ease their transition to Lennard, one of the most crowded schools in the district, with nearly 2,400 students.

A self-contained group would be good for them, he thought.

Students had mixed reactions.

"I never thought of myself as doing college when I was in ninth grade," David said. "I thought, am I ready for this?"

But, like the others, he was looking ahead to years of costly schooling and saw it as a way to speed up the process.

Fifteen RCMA students applied. They had to compete with students from other schools based on grades and test scores. Because they were not from a district-run school, they had to take a writing test.

Seven made the cut.

Did their teachers worry about what might happen when they got to Lennard?

"It was an experience, they tried it," said Bethany, the RCMA English teacher. "If you didn't give them that opportunity, then you limited them. So there's no reason not to."

The first year was relatively easy, the kids said. The HCC courses were held on Lennard's campus, covering topics such as health, vocabulary and study skills. And the five waded into areas beyond academics.

Emmanuel had time to run track and cross country, to the point his mother worried he wasn't learning enough. Janely joined clubs.

David, who has an older brother at Lennard, welcomed the chance to mix with a more diverse population. "It was more interesting," he said.

Still, the sight of dozens of buses unloading at the bus ramp was a culture shock for some.

Janely had never seen so many kids at once. She didn't know if she should say hello to girls she didn't know. Fernanda worried she would get lost and arrive late to class. And she did.

They had heard about life at typical middle and high schools — the fights, the arrests, the police patrols — and it alarmed them.

It's like being thrown in with a group of vulgar farm workers, Fernanda's father told her. You just keep your head down and work.

Janely came to a similar conclusion.

"You just have to filter it out and realize that, yes, you are more exposed to this stuff," she said. "And that is just kind of life.

"Because in the grand scheme of things, I'm there to get my education, and I'm not going to let other people affect my education."

• • •

In a typical year, 10 to 15 percent of students in a Collegiate program will leave, said Christos Notidis, who runs the one at Lennard. Some get after-school jobs or have personal distractions. They have to maintain a 3.0 grade point average, and a 2.0 in their HCC classes.

Two of the RCMA seven did not even make it to sophomore year.

This past fall, the remaining five began their daily walk to HCC, just across 24th Street NE. They took courses that included public speaking and financial management, which were easy enough.

But a survey course called Introduction to Humanities gave them fits.

The reading assignments were massive, they said. They would be tested, not on skills, but on pure content. And, for some, half the classes were taught online.

Esmeralda was part of the online group. And her family's apartment had no Internet.

Her stress mounted as the semester wore on. "I would go to my godparents' house with a tablet and try to get as much work done as I could at night," she said.

Most of the five worried about their humanities exam.

Esmeralda's grade was so low, for awhile it appeared she might have to leave the program.

A counselor suggested she take Advanced Placement classes instead of trying to tough it out.

But quitting didn't feel right.

The only one of the five who spent her elementary years at a district school in Manatee County, Esmeralda had impressed her teachers back at the RCMA middle school by working her way to the top tier of the class.

She had been eager to try for the Collegiate program. "They told us they thought I had the capacity to do it," she said. "If they're telling me, that's because they know I can."

Notidis wished Esmeralda had come to him for help. After all, he said, there are libraries with computers at Lennard and HCC.

But students that age often don't speak up, and now he's resolved to survey new students about their Internet access.

After the grades were posted, Notidis reviewed Esmeralda's alternatives. Could she retake the humanities class in the summer online? Probably not. Her family will be back in South Carolina for work, again in housing without Internet.

She still has options, Notidis said. She can take an Advanced Placement or College Level Examination Program (CLEP) exam for a course outside the program to make up the three credits.

"Where there's a will, there is always a way," he said.

• • •

Most mornings, the five students meet for breakfast in Lennard's noisy cafeteria. Some afternoons, they study together.

They go home to houses and trailers of various sizes and dimensions. Janely's house is on a corner lot in Wimauma. David lives in a modest Ruskin subdivision. Esmeralda's family recently moved to a rental home on a long, winding road with retirement communities nearby.

David hits the books right away, while the material is fresh. Then he's free to relax, read, watch television news or cooking shows.

Emmanuel takes a nap, eats dinner, then studies sometimes until midnight.

In time, the five will face tough decisions about college — and how to pay for it. Resources include the counselors at Lennard and HCC. Haggett said his staff also is standing by to help the students navigate the search for scholarships.

In Bethany's mind, the adult Janely is a rocket scientist.

Haggett looks forward to the pep talks the group will give to his younger students someday. Just as others did for them.

"I see them coming back," he said.

Contact Marlene Sokol at (813) 226-3356 or msokol@tampabay.com. Follow @marlenesokol.