VACAVILLE — The hard academic work quietly accomplished by University of California, Berkeley-bound Erika James is indicative of the young woman.
“She is such a great student and she doesn’t realize it,” said Karla Gonzalez, a college counselor at Will C. Wood High School who helped her prepare for college.
Part of that is to become the legacy that her mother, who died late in her junior year, would be proud of ”because it was what my mother would have wanted me to do, to work hard,” James said.