Adult grads outnumber kids 10 to 1
Graduate fulfills her mother’s dying wish
Staff writer
Adult online graduates of Centre High School will far outnumber the 12 seniors crossing the stage at Sunday’s commencement ceremonies.
“This year we have over 120 actually graduating,” Centre superintendent Daniel Ackland said.
A total of 113 adult online learners will get their diplomas. Forty-eight of them, including an 83-year-old, “verbally said they will be walking at our brick-and-mortar graduation,” Ackland said.
The back stories of adult graduates often represent heartbreaking turns of fortune — from youthful miscalculations to financial hard luck to family health issues — that derailed traditional diploma tracks.
Most thought they’d return to school “later,” a time frame that can recede over many years.
Whatever the cause, commencement almost always brings graduates to tears as they look back on their hard work and determination and look forward to a degree that unlocks opportunity.
Kansas Online Learning Program is administered by the Centre USD 397, which receives $709 from the state for each course taken.
The program pairs each student with an advocate “to be a cheerleader for them,” Ackland said.
KOLP makes it easy for adults to start taking classes — sometimes within three days of application. Students attend classes and do assignments on a free, district-issued Chromebook loaded with an education platform at any hour of the day or night.
Easy access doesn’t mean an easy degree, however. Students have to pass all courses and must take the number of courses they lack on their transcript.
Students need determination to take courses steadily, one at a time, up to six per calendar year.
It can be grueling.
Amy Kinney, 45, of Topeka, “put everything on hold for my kids,” thinking she’d return to school later.
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago when she was on public assistance that a social worker asked whether she wanted to better herself.
The youngest of Kinney’s three kids had just graduated from high school and was out of the house.
“So I thought I would have the extra time to go ahead and work on me now — my goals, my dreams,” she said.
She enrolled in Centre’s online program on a certified nursing assistant course while simultaneously working by day as a home health aide for a quadriplegic patient and caring by night for her terminally ill mother.
Along the way she was able to buy her first car. (She made her last payment Saturday.)
Kinney carried her Chromebook “around with me like the Bible,” she said, stealing moments to complete classes she’d missed since leaving school in the 7th grade.
She knew her mother would not live to see her graduate, so she arranged an early graduation photo shoot with her last August.
She borrowed a cap and gown from her son and posed with her mom, who died three months later.
The dedication could be gut-wrenching, she said, recalling the night when her mother took a final turn for the worse with a stroke.
That same night, Kinney went home to take a final exam because she had promised her mother she would finish high school.
Amanda Gonzales, also graduating from the program, similarly was raising four children. She “just stepped out, thinking that I can just go back to school later, and it’ll be OK,” she said.
Now 34, Gonzales, a Wichita resident, has spent the past year taking the remaining 17 credits she needed for a diploma.
It was her second try, having started before.
“It was so hard — scheduling, trying to find a babysitter,” she said. “And because I don’t drive, I would have to get transportation. It threw me back.”
This time, even though “you just want to come home from work and relax,” she signed up and powered through the classes with the academic support, planning, and advising of the Wichita State University Trio program.
“Sometimes I wanted to give up,” she said. But she’s relieved and said she recommends anyone thinking about it to substitute now for later if they want to finish high school.