My mother was the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college. So was my sister-in-law.
There are many, many children in the Sweet Home area who, if they were to graduate from a four-year college, would also be the first in their families to do so.
That’s the point behind two new programs that we’ve reported on previously and, again, on page 13 in today’s newspaper. The goal of these programs is to encourage kids to think about college.
Both my parents graduated from college and I suppose that may be why I always sort of figured I would at least attend one. I wasn’t much of a student when I was a kid. I liked to read and I wasn’t too bad at writing, but I really disliked school.
Still, when I found myself on my own at age 18, attending Rogue Community College in my hometown of Grants Pass, I liked college a little better than high school. For one thing, you could take just about any course you wanted and no one actually forced you do anything. I liked that.
But after a year I found myself moved down to California, due to a variety of circumstances, and working in a lumberyard. I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of hard work and manual labor, so I kind of liked the job. My specialty was putting together huge units of lumber for high-end homes that were being constructed in a nearby subdivision.
Problem was, the pay wasn’t that great and the topics of conversation among my fellow employees tended to focus on cars and trucks, women, weekend binges and sports – not necessarily in that order. I eventually realized that the future could be brighter than this and that I probably had to go to college if I wanted to do something different. Plus, my high school had awarded me a fairly substantial scholarship – $2,000 – that had to be used up within four years. The clock was ticking and I had to go to a four-year school to get the money, which was still quite a bit in the early 1980s.
So I went to the nearest school, which happened to be Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, decided I liked journalism, and went that route.
Point is, I understand well how many kids don’t really give college much thought. But in this day and age, if you want to do just about anything besides work with your hands, you have to graduate from college. Then you have to do it.
Sweet Home is filled with smart people. Many are not well-educated, but they have good common sense and they learn what they need to know. In the days when the lumber industry was booming and there were well-paid jobs easily available to anyone who could handle hard work, book education wasn’t all that important.
Lest I offend with that comment about the lack of educated folks, the numbers in our report bear that up. According to our story, out of the 192 students who graduated from Sweet Home High School in 2003, 27 went to a four-year college or university. That’s 14 percent who started at a four-year school. (Hopefully, some more transferred to one from a community college later.) But that was a big year. In 2005, 7 percent went from Sweet Home High to a four-year college.
Going to college doesn’t mean you have to be highly intelligent. I know plenty of people who were average students who went to college and did just fine. I taught (journalism) in college for nine years and I have plenty of students who had to work hard, but were bound and determined to get that degree. And they did.
That’s why I’m excited about these programs. One, Gear-Up (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) provides help for youngsters in the lower grades – mentoring, visits to college campuses, counseling and support, with the possibility of scholarship help later on when they’re actually ready to attend college. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
The second program, ASPIRE (Access to Student Assistance Programs in Reach of Everyone) aims to help high school counselors encourage students to look at post-high school training as a real option.
There are a lot of reasons why our nation has prospered over the centuries, but one is that education was an early priority for the colonists who settled here. When the Puritans and other early immigrants from England arrived, one of the first things they did after establishing viable communities was to establish schools and colleges.
Education is still important. If nothing else, leaving Sweet Home for a while to experience the world outside, new ideas, new people, can help the young people who are likely to form the next generation here help make Sweet Home a healthy community. Experiencing new things helps you determine who you want to be and how you want to live.
John F. Kennedy once said that “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education.” That could be said of Sweet Home: What our kids learn now will determine how prepared they are to take over the leadership of this community in the next generation.