El poder del salto de altura para abrir caminos al futuro: rompiendo barreras, generando cambios.

For over 35 years, High Jump has helped students discover what’s possible for their futures. At a pivotal moment between childhood and adolescence, students come to High Jump ready to learn, grow, and challenge themselves — and leave with the confidence, curiosity, and support to thrive in high school and beyond. These outcomes create lasting impact not only for students themselves, but also for their families, communities, and future generations.

At High Jump’s 2026 Spring of Opportunity Benefit on May 1, The Honorable Judge Sonia Antolec (Alumna Cohort 7) shared her personal High Jump journey and reflected on the power of belonging.

Throughout her career, The Honorable Judge Sonia Antolec has worked to advance justice, expand opportunity, and empower marginalized communities. As the first single mother and multicultural woman appointed to the Illinois Court of Claims, she has become a respected legal leader, educator, and advocate committed to creating pathways for future generations.

Read on to hear her inspiring story in her own words.

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I want to share with you what opportunity has looked like in my life — what it looks like before you have it, what happens when someone hands it to you, and what you do with it once you do.

I was born in Pilsen to parents who gave my brothers and me everything they could. We had a wonderful childhood. We didn’t know what we didn’t have. We didn’t know that other families didn’t put their winter coats on layaway months in advance so we’d have warm jackets that fit by winter. We didn’t know that other kids’ dads didn’t pick them up after school to take them to work. We didn’t know that the small Catholic grammar school we loved — the one that eventually closed before I could graduate — had the most out-of-date textbooks in the Archdiocese.

My mom was a cotton picker into her teen years. My dad still wears a blue collar to this day. I didn’t know I was “first-generation” anything until long after I’d graduated from law school, because we were just living our lives. Other people came up with the labels and the rules and the ways of the world.

But my parents knew. They saw a kid who loved math, who loved homework, who finished tests early and asked for more. And when they heard about High Jump, they made it work. One of them drove me to Latin School every Saturday for three years, because there was no direct public-transit route from our neighborhood to that side of the city.

What happened to me at High Jump is the thing I want all of you to understand.

I sat in classrooms with kids from Humboldt Park, the South Side, Pilsen — kids just like me — and we talked about the war in Iraq, injustices in the court system, different interpretations of the same text. We took the CTA to each other’s houses. We walked to McDonald’s down the street from campus like we belonged there, because we did belong there. We learned algebra that went so far beyond what my community school could offer that it carried me into Saint Ignatius College Prep, into every honors class they offered freshmen, into a partial scholarship for a summer at Choate — the prep school the Kennedys went to. As a high schooler it was my first free summer, and I wanted more.

High Jump didn’t just teach me. It told me, with every Saturday class and every summer of “enrichment” before we called it that, that I belonged in any room I walked into.

Saint Ignatius helped me graduate college in three years. That helped me earn scholarships to law school, where I graduated in three more — as a part-time night student, while raising my son.

Let me say that again, because I want it to land: I graduated law school in three years, at night, as a single mother.

I am now approaching twenty years in my legal career. I have been appointed twice by the Governor of Illinois to serve on the Illinois Court of Claims, where I help decide cases brought by citizens against the state — cases where everyday people seek justice from a system that doesn’t always know they exist. I run my own law practice. I serve on the board of High Jump.

I am a Latina. A first-generation college graduate. A former teen mom. The daughter of a cotton picker. Sitting on a court of the State of Illinois.

I tell you this not to brag. I tell you this because somewhere in this city, there is always a kid who has never seen anyone who looks like her do anything like that — and the only reason I can stand here and tell you about it is because somebody decided to invest in me when I was twelve.

Approaching twenty years in this career, I have made it my work to give back. The single mom in a difficult situation — I was her, so I help her. The Latino couple who wants to start a business but doesn’t know where to begin legally — I’m helping them right now. The senior citizen who was preyed upon by a car dealer — helped him too. The legal permanent resident afraid to leave the country because of forty-year-old traffic tickets on his record — I helped him too. My mom — I take care of her now. Whatever she needs.

That’s the practice. That’s the career.

But here is what I really want to share with you. Because High Jump’s CEO Nate Pietrini and I were talking about this — about what a parent really sees when they look at their child.

When my parents drove me across the city every Saturday, they were not thinking about Court of Claims appointments. They were thinking, “Maybe she gets out. Maybe she gets further than we did. Maybe her life is a little easier.” That’s all most parents are hoping for. Just more. Just enough.

What they couldn’t have imagined is that the opportunity they fought to give me would not stop with me. My son — who I raised through law school nights and study weekends — is thriving today because of the doors High Jump opened for me. He grew up watching his mother walk into rooms she “wasn’t supposed to” be in, and he learned that those rooms belong to people like us too.

And here is something I want you to sit with:

I am already planning for my grandchildren.

I am thinking about what kind of education they will have. What neighborhoods they will get to grow up in. What conversations they will get to have at the dinner table. What rooms they will walk into without ever once wondering whether they belong.

That is what one Saturday class can do across three generations. That is what one summer of enrichment becomes when you give it to the right twelve-year-old. That is what your support of High Jump is — not a donation to one cohort, but an investment in the parents who got those kids here, and in the children those kids will one day raise.

When you come from the have-nots, you don’t even know what you’re excluded from. You don’t know that others are working against you.

High Jump makes sure you don’t know. And makes sure it doesn’t matter.

So when you consider supporting High Jump, I am asking you to give with your whole heart. Not for one child. For their parents. For their children. For the grandchildren none of us have met yet, but who will inherit whatever we build here and now.

Thank you, High Jump. Thank you all.