The offer was simple: Nova Moisa wanted to shoot a few senior portraits for free.

"Sure,"

officials said when Moisa called last fall. "That sounds nice."

At a school where 65 percent of the 950 students live in poverty, administrators are usually too busy helping kids find food and housing to worry about the extras.

But for many young people, it's the extras that make school bearable. Decades after graduation, adults hold on to their high school trophies, their letterman jackets and the corsages they pressed between yearbook pages.

In the world of teenage mementos, the senior portrait reigns supreme.

Today in the Portland region, some parents spend $1,000 or more to secure the perfect print for their kid's yearbook. The professional shots show teens in fields of flowers and beside brick walls. Those images are supposed to stand in for the whole school experience, memorializing the hopeful person a teenager was before real life came knocking.

For the families who can't afford them, the senior picture can feel like just another barrier separating the haves from the have-nots.

So when Moisa called Parkrose last year, she wasn't just offering

. She was looking for ways to bridge that divide.

BE AWESOME TO SOMEBODY

Nova Moisa's traded work as an photography assistant to pay for her senior portrait.

Moisa knows exactly how much a senior picture matters. Twenty-five years after Moisa graduated from McMinnville High School, her mother still keeps the shot above the mantel.



Hers is the pretty and pensive type of portrait, with the classic hands-under-chin pose. Her hair is forever coiffed in a short 80s perm. Shoulder pads give her the look of a business woman in the making.



"I remember how confident I was, ready to take on the world," Moisa said recently.



Even back in 1989, senior pictures cost a few hundred dollars. Moisa's family was "government cheese and, at times, powdered milk for cereal poor."



Lack of money never stopped a teenage girl from wanting. When Moisa's friends booked their shoots, she yearned to have one, too. When she learned that a friend's older sister was a professional photographer, Moisa hashed out a deal: She'd volunteer as an assistant, holding the reflectors and carrying lights, in exchange for one free session.



Moisa, now 43, went on to earn a degree in photography. She shot weddings and school pictures professionally before settling down as a marketing manager at Standard Insurance.



The Northeast Portland resident started thinking about senior pictures again last year when she read an article about Mark Bustos, a high-end New York hair stylist who donates free hair cuts every Sunday to the homeless. He shared photos of the cuts with the label #BeAwesomeToSomebody.



"I loved that," Moisa said. "He was sharing his story and asking others, 'What can you do?'"



Senior portraits have become even more expensive since Moisa was a teen. Portland-area photographers now charge around $300 a session. For more money, companies will provide hair and makeup stylists. None of those fees include actual prints: Photo packages start at $200 and top off somewhere over $2,000.



Some schools, such as Northeast Portland's Grant High, contract with a company to ensure every student has a chance for a professional shoot. Last year, the Hillsboro Schools Foundation gave Liberty High $1,000 to create an in-house, student-run photography business aimed at offering every student a professional senior portrait. And at Beaverton's Sunset High School, the photography class shoots some portraits for free, too.



But at most schools, poor students either must have a friend shoot their portrait or rely on the generic school picture, a reminder that they didn't have what others did.



"Of course we're going to cover the basics, but things like school pictures and the senior sweater, those get blown by the wayside all the time," said Sonny Snyder, the homeless coordinator for Parkrose School District. "You don't need a senior sweater to survive, but I do think it does take a toll on you when you can't get a yearbook or senior pictures."





Nova Moisa's job at Standard Insurance offered her some free time off to volunteer.

Moisa wanted to donate free senior portraits to a kid who needed them, but she wasn't sure how to find a needy student. Then, while volunteering for the Rose Festival, Moisa met Chazmyne Brown, Parkrose High's 2014 Rose Princess. Brown told Moisa that most Parkrose students live in poverty.



The East Portland school district has about 250 homeless students, Snyder told Moisa when she called last fall. About 20 of those are high school seniors. Moisa began shooting in November.



Moisa drove teens from Parkrose to Northwest Portland parks and the St. Johns Bridge. One wanted his portrait shot in front of the "Portland Oregon" sign. Samantha Waldrupe wanted hers done alongside railroad tracks.



"She picked the perfect place to take pictures," Waldrupe said. "I was really excited because right now we have money issues, so I didn't know if I was going to be able to pay for somebody to do my pictures."



When it was Vyctoria Hunt's turn, she crimped her hair and found a flower to augment her style. She chose two outfits -- a flowered dress with boots and a white jumpsuit with gold accents.



"It was really fun," Hunt said. "I liked the way she took my picture. It wasn't awkward or anything like that. I was really comfortable. I like how my pictures turned out."



As students gushed about their shoots, Snyder looked back at his own. A decade ago, he was a Parkrose senior himself. The photo of him as a mohawked teenager still hangs in one of the high school's classrooms.



For students, he realized, senior portraits aren't just snapshots. Yearbook photos are proof that they existed at all.



Moisa shot her seventh senior portrait session in January. She gave each teen a flash drive full of pictures. And she raised money to provide each kid with a $100 gift card to Pro Photo Supply, where they can make prints of the portraits.





With any luck, those photos will hang above mantels and in high school classrooms someday. For now, and forever, they'll appear in the Parkrose High 2015 yearbook.

-- Casey Parks

503-221-8271