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Judge Ryan urges East High students to make good choices
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
From birth, the prospect of Michael Ryan’s success appeared dim.
His mother was only 14 when she learned she was pregnant with him. Before now-Judge Michael Ryan of Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court was born, his biological father was in prison, convicted of bank robbery.
His stepfather regularly beat his mother, and they both were heroin addicts. He relied on the free breakfast and lunch at school.
“I was a kid that wasn’t supposed to make it,” Judge Ryan told East High School students Wednesday.
The judge, who is Ohio’s only black juvenile court judge, spoke at the high school as part of Nonviolence Week.
Judge Ryan graduated from high school and earned a scholarship to Allegheny College near Pittsburgh. After his college graduation, he went on to graduate from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He passed the bar at 25 and became a judge at 34.
“You have choices that you must make,” the judge said.
Growing up, Judge Ryan chose not to get involved in gangs, even though friends encouraged it. He avoided drugs even though that meant he went hungry.
And he excelled at school and enrolled in his school’s gifted and talented program.
As a boy, Judge Ryan’s family moved frequently. As heroin addicts, his mother and stepfather couldn’t keep jobs. That meant they couldn’t pay rent.
They sold the family’s food stamps for cash to buy drugs. His stepfather went to prison, and the man’s mother took Judge Ryan and his sister to live with her.
His mother died at 28, and his stepgrandmother died about a year later. Judge Ryan and his sister, moved in with one of his stepfather’s sisters and then another and then with his grandmother.
Doing well in school was his way out of the kind of life his parents lived.
“I recognized that the choices I make would influence me in my life,” Judge Ryan said.