Melak, the very brave and wonderful 16-year-old refugee and an especially gifted Bishop Maginn High School student, has been accepted by the LIM Fashion School in New York City.

This is wonderful news; I am so proud of her.

It took a few weeks of ferocious battling, but she decided to pursue a fashion career and stay in school. This is a great choice for Melak, who loves style and all things fashion.

Now comes the hard part – getting enough financial aid so she can go there. The school is ferociously dedicated to getting its students into college and very successful.

“Hey Jon, I got some exciting news to share with you.,” she wrote me today.

“I got accepted to LIM, the fashion college in New York City. I’m going in for fashion merchandising and a minor major in business. I’m so excited, and I’m happy I listened to you.”

I’m happy too.

Melak, who is iron-willed and fiercely independent, and I butted heads awhile back. She told me she was leaving school; she wants her own place to live and would work instead in an Amazon warehouse.

Melak and I became instant friends; we just connected. She was a student in my writing class at the school and her stories were bone-chilling and inspiring.

We often talked about her life as a refugee, the death of her grandmother, who couldn’t get out of Iraq.

There has been real pressure on Melak about how to dress and live, she is very much her own person. I would be proud to have a daughter like that, as I am so proud of my own.

“I am hoping to study fashion merchandising,” Melak told me tonight when I congratulated her from skipping working at McDonald’s for the next few years.

“I also want to study business and hoping to open my own business through LIM college.”

I wished her luck. The big thing, I said, was that she had committed to finishing high school, then moving on to college. That was what mattered over the long haul.

She was so determined to play with her friends that she risked sniper fire to do it and heard bullets whizzing past her head.

The family lost two homes and fled two countries – Syria and Iraq.

She loves America and was eager to leave school and be independent. This is another big win for the Army Of Good, we have helped Melak in ways that made a huge difference in her life, even before this. Thanks for that.

I talked to Sue Silverstein about Melak’s future, and she said Melak was so gifted, the school was pleading with her to say and move on to college.

I joined the fray and told her I couldn’t in good conscience take people’s money to help her in any way to drop out of school.

I knew she was angry about that; she doesn’t like being told what to do. I told her I wasn’t telling her what to do; I was telling her what I could and couldn’t do.

She focused on LIM, and Sue and school officials spent many hours helping her write her application letter and financial aid requests.

She got a partial scholarship from the school and is seeking federal student loan assistance. We’ll see what happens. We’ll fight as hard as we can.

The school tuition is too high for the Army of Good, but I suspect we will help in smaller ways, and we are all going to see if we can help with the federal loan process.

We believe it will be easier to help refugees now that there is new leadership in Washington. Melak is a movie waiting to happen.

Her family was driven from Iraq and then from Syria and spent years in U.N. refugee camps. She saw an awful lot of things no child should ever see.

She is a wonderful friend, cheerful, tough, headstrong, and creative. She is also charismatic; she can do whatever she sets her powerful mind to do.

I will do everything I can to help. This one mustn’t fall through the cracks or be left behind. I’m very optimistic now that she is determined to be a fashion designer. Hopefully, it will be at LIM. If not, there are other places.

I’m not asking for any assistance from the AOG; this application and loan process will take months.  If she needs help, it probably will be for minor expenses for going to college. But it’s premature to do that now.

I’m so delighted that she has chosen this path, agreed to stay in school and go to college.