Hammer Down
A very smart man, Dad was able to go to college for six hours. His first visit lasted just over an hour. An educrat at Western Illinois University demanded I produce the parent I said lived with me at 603 West Adams Street. He wanted dad in his office tomorrow morning, or I’d have to move into a dorm like the rest of the freshmen. There was no way I could afford living in a dorm, so I called dad and he started driving hours before dawn to get to Macomb the next morning when Mr. Rules showed up for work. We lied through our teeth.
Dad came to graduation three years later for his second and final visit to any college campus. The youngest of seven in the Madalinski turned Malin clan had made it through, and was heading off to grad school in a couple months with a scholarship. I owed dad that graduation, seeing as though my stubbornness resulted in missing graduation with my high school class.
The bridge from high school failure (a little harsh, but if the shoe fits …) to college grad was the College of Lake County, a community college in Grayslake, Illinois. CLC was out in the hinterlands at the time, on a rural road that served as the official drag strip for adolescent gearheads. Not exactly Harvard Square, the entrance road was streaked with rubber laid down by Novas, Darts and the occasional fancy pants Trans Am.
Inauspicious would be the word to describe my arrival at CLC. The ACT score was good enough and netted a few brochures from schools I had heard of, but my insolence to question the relevance of high school while working full time to help support the family was not well received or even understood by the short-sleeved, dress-shirted despots at Grayslake High Admin. With no one in the family who had ever gone to college to serve as a guide and general skepticism oozing from the guidance counselors, I followed the smell of burning rubber to my first class. That semester and the few that followed made everything else possible.
Tom Hanks has a similar affinity for community college, available here at the NY Times.
Such are the memories that serve as the foundation for my advocacy to blur the lines between college and high school, to support first in family college kids in Davenport, to reduce college debt, to eliminate post-secondary anxiety, and to position this city and region as a place with a talent pool that draws more than its fair share of investment in a global marketplace. A community is, at a minimum, the sum total of its talent. The quality of its workforce determines its quality of life when capital can move anywhere on the planet at the click of a touchpad. Kudos to Davenport Schools for their Dual Graduation Program and kudos to Eastern Iowa Community College and Restoration St. Louis for the downtown campus they are poised to create.
Regional competitors including Chicago have figured out universal community college education and states like Tennessee and Mississippi have devised their own plans. Cities and states are the laboratories of democracy, typically well ahead of the federal government. Davenport Schools’ Dual Graduation Program is one such example that is out ahead of the feds, with another plan announced last week that will likely go nowhere in Congress. While we wait for the D.C. partisans to agree on how to work the gear shift, here’s hoping more and more Davenport kids leave the starting line swiftly and keep the pedal down throughout a lifetime of learning.
