Mom begs at off-ramp for son's tuition

BELLEVUE, Wash. - A mother's love knows no end. Now one single mom on the east side is going to extremes - so her son can follow his dream.

People driving through Bellevue may see her on the streets - begging on freeway ramps for money to pay her son's tuition at a prestigious dance school.

For D.J. Strong it's the chance of a lifetime. His dance teacher is amazed at his talent after just a year in the studio.

"He has captured all the technique and all of the charisma," says Carolyn Farrar of the Premiere Dance Center.

Seventeen-year-old Strong recently got accepted to one of the most prestigious dance schools in the country.

"I cried. I was shaking," says his mother, Shelle Curley.

She wasn't about to let her son's big break slip away. But even after a $45,000 scholarship, the unemployed single mom was thousands of dollars short.

"We'd do whatever it took to get him there," she says.

That's why she's begging on a freeway off-ramp in Bellevue.

"Tuition help needed," she says to motorists who drive by. "Donate a few dollars. Help a boy live his dreams. ... Help a young man go to college."

"It doesn't make sense to me not to do it," she told KATU's Seattle sister station, KOMO News. "It should be automatic. You should go to the ends of the earth for your children."

But getting a profitable spot can be tough.

"And the one corner you have to fight for," she says. "So I've been in several verbal altercations with some of the people up there fighting for that spot."

Curley says she has made up to $45 an hour on one off-ramp.

Her son says he doesn't like seeing his mom out in the rain in just flip-flops.

"I feel pretty nervous when she does that," D.J. says.

But he knows why she's there.

"It shows me that she really loves me a lot and really believes in me, and will do anything like beg on the side of a freeway," he says.

A mom giving her son a future ... a few dollars at a time.

How about you? What do you think of panhandling for your children's education?