Where did the woman who is in line to be the next Supreme Court justice come from?

The New York Times visits Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, 55, was a student at Blessed Sacrament in the 1960s, attending kindergarten through eighth grade at the Catholic school and graduating at the top of the class of 1968. One of the red-brick buildings where she lived with her family in the nearby Bronxdale Houses public housing complex can be seen from the school’s asphalt playground.

Then, as now, the older students attend school in upstairs classrooms inside Blessed Sacrament Church, and the younger ones have classes in a beige-brick building behind it. Perhaps one of the scuffs on the floor of the classroom where Jacqueline sat was made by Judge Sotomayor. Perhaps not. It is impossible to know the depth of one woman’s impact on the school, just as it is impossible to know how the school might have shaped her life or judicial thinking.

But the children wonder, and they imagine.

“Sometimes I think, ‘What if I’m sitting at the same desk she sat in?’ ” said Branaijah Melvin, 11, one of 30 students attending summer school at Blessed Sacrament.

Much has been said about Judge Sotomayor’s uniquely American journey, from the Bronx projects to Ivy League schools to Supreme Court nominee. Blessed Sacrament is a place where many such journeys begin.

The school, on a beachless Beach Avenue in the Soundview neighborhood, is home to about 280 students during the regular academic year. Nearly 200 are Hispanic. Girls outnumber boys. It is a largely middle-class neighborhood. But this is the Bronx, not the suburbs. Graffiti has scarred mailboxes, traffic signals and the walls and doors of homes and storefronts, and loops of razor wire top parts of the church’s chain-link fences.

Several students live at the Bronxdale Houses. The average household income of city public housing residents is $22,728, and the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom unit, subsidized by the federal government, is $299, according to the New York City Housing Authority. For students from families who are part of the Blessed Sacrament parish, the annual tuition at the school is $2,900.

Grace Chemi, Blessed Sacrament’s principal, said some parents work two jobs.

“We have a lot of single parents, moms raising children on their own,” Ms. Chemi said. “We also have children being raised by grandparents.”

Jacqueline said both of her parents work hard. “I don’t really see my mom because she works a lot,” she said.

Alicia’s mother, Paula Dickenson, 42, is a single parent who makes about $10 an hour as a day care center teacher and is taking a semester off from pursuing a master’s degree at Lehman College to focus on her three children. Alicia enjoys baking cupcakes, and she is currently reading “New Moon,” part of the Twilight vampire series. “I’m actually half done,” she said.

Branaijah lives with her mother, father and younger sister. Painting is her favorite hobby. “I like to paint sceneries,” she said. “My mom sometimes frames them and hangs them up in the living room.” She is curious about Judge Sotomayor in a way that the members of the Senate committee, for all their questions, are decidedly not.

“She could have painted like me when she was my age,” Branaijah said.

The judge was a stellar student at Blessed Sacrament. “Her attendance was immaculate,” said Herminia Roman, the assistant principal, who was not at the school in those days but reviewed the judge’s file.

Take a look at the link for more.

PHOTO: Jacqueline Garcia, 8, above, in her summer math class at Blessed Sacrament School in the Bronx, which Sonia Sotomayor attended as a child in the ’60s. Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times