Sebastian Boone will tell you straight: his freshman year at Vandalia was ugly.

"I was really in the gutter with my grades," he says. Absences stacked up. Assignments didn't get turned in. The motivation to show up and do the work just wasn't there. School, as he puts it, had become this thing where he thought, "Oh, school's stupid."

Then the SAP team pulled him in.

They met with him, talked with him, and asked what he needed. They helped him figure out how to move forward — not by handing him answers, but by showing up, consistently, with a mix of encouragement and honesty that Sebastian hadn't experienced before.

"They really made me feel like they care," he says. "Not only to get good grades, but to see me succeed and to see me doing better mentally."

It worked — not because it was easy, but because it gave him something to aim at.

"I wanted to make those people proud," he says. "I give them full credit."

He pauses, then corrects himself. "Yeah. I worked pretty hard for it."

Sebastian is a sophomore now, retaking a couple of freshman classes to pick up the credits he lost. He's grinding. And he's finding something in the process he didn't expect: confidence. For a long time, believing in himself was the hardest part.

"I just have a lot of struggles with believing it in myself," he says. But the SAP team kept telling him what they saw. And slowly, he started to see it too.

"Sometimes I just take a step back, breathe, and be like — I am an intelligent person. And what's the point of wasting it?"

There was a moment — he remembers it — when he pulled up his grades and, for the first time, didn't feel a pit in his stomach. That was the signal. Something had shifted.

Sebastian thinks a lot about what drives people. He has a framework for it. Hope, he says, is the temporary uplift — the gasoline that gets you moving when everything feels heavy. But hope alone isn't enough. "If you sit around all day hoping that life's going to get better, then it's not going to get better. But if you have that hope and you use it as courage" — then it becomes something real.

That clarity comes from somewhere deeper than a classroom.

His brother Caleb passed away last December. When Sebastian talks about heroes, Caleb is one of the first people he names — the cool older brother who listened to metal and loomed large in Sebastian's younger years. His mom is the other. She works with disabled adults, cooking for them, talking to them, and helping them through everyday tasks. She's older than most of his friends' moms and works constantly.

"The reason I'm working is for you," Sebastian says, describing her philosophy. "And at the end of the day, you look at that, and that's so motivational. That's a beautiful thing — for someone to care about someone so much that they put in every ounce of work that they can."

He wishes he could tell her what she means to him. He's not sure he's found the words yet.

But he's working on it — because Sebastian writes. Lyrics, mostly. Midwest emo. Alternative. He listens to Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, and Slipknot. He sings in his room. People have told him he has a good voice. He's thought about putting a band together, maybe getting something on YouTube.

What he wants from music isn't fame. It's impact.

"People talk about their favorite artists, and they say, this person saved my life," he says. "The fact that you can make this beautiful mixture of sounds, and it can save someone's life — being just a light for anyone, is such a great thing."

He wants to be that light. For even one person.

Sebastian knows the road is long. He's fifteen, still learning how to do the boring work that builds toward something bigger. He describes it like tectonic plates — pressure building invisibly, day after day, until one day the ground shifts and makes "great, beautiful giants that reach the sky."

And he's learning the most important thing of all: that the approval he's been chasing from others has to eventually come from within.

"I'm proud of myself," he says, "and it's with the help of others, but not because of others."

He's not finished. But he's moving.