Courage, Hard Work, Red Roses Bury Old Secret
For years Irene Olin stood guard over an embarrassing secret locked deep inside her heart.
She kept it from friends. She kept it from employers. She even kept it from her husband, Mike.
Few secrets last forever and one day Olin finally told Mike about her dream to go to college and become a nurse. Just one roadblock stopped the Spokane woman:
Olin, 44, was a high school dropout.
“It’s not the kind of thing you brag about. ‘Hey, I don’t have a high school diploma.”’ she says. “But I always thought that someday, someday I’d get it.”
Someday arrived the other night inside a crowded, overheated gymnasium that reverberated with the chatter and movement of restless kids.
Wiping away tears, Olin walked across a stage in a black cap and gown and shook hands with a line of dark-robed academics.
“They had the nicest smiles that went all the way into their eyes,” she says. “Later, when we marched out in the procession, my daughter handed me a dozen red roses.
“I lost it. That’s the first dozen red roses I’ve ever had in my life.”
No hallowed university commencement can match the raw emotion of a graduation of the community colleges’ Adult Basic Education programs.
This is no big media event and that’s a shame. In back of every smile, behind each red and weeping eye, is an odds-defying story of personal triumph.
This year, 515 adults mustered the courage to head back to the classroom and earn high school diplomas, certificates of general educational development or English as a second language certificates.
Most of these people know the sting of being branded as losers or dropouts. Many finished their schooling while juggling jobs and children and marriages.
There was Sherri Shinkle, who got a GED after 17 years of false starts. “I didn’t want to be a 35-year-old uneducated mom with no skills,” she says.
There was MiKyong Sauer, who immigrated to the United States in 1994 from Korea only to find herself lost in a strange land, unable to speak the language.
“I couldn’t understand the ways of people here,” she says in her newly mastered English. “But I wanted to prove to myself that I could overcome my fear and be more independent.”
Olin’s struggle began 26 years ago. As a high school senior, she laid out her future like a travel map. She would graduate, give the U.S. Navy four years and, in exchange, become a nurse.
She didn’t count on getting pregnant.
“You couldn’t get birth control without parental consent and if your parents were like mine, well, that’s a joke,” Olin says. “Being pregnant wasn’t the thing to do back in those days. So I dropped out and got married.”
Three kids later, the marriage blew up. She avoided welfare by pushing fast-food burgers and managing grocery store deli counters.
Olin remarried two years ago to a railroad engineer. She has a good job with Seafirst Bank’s Credit Card Center. Her children are mostly grown.
There was no real reason why Olin would ever have to explain her lack of diploma. “Except when I start something,” she adds, “I have to finish.”
Mike gave his wife total support. Three nights a week, after working all day, Olin hit the books at continuing education classes.
“I always admire people like Irene who come in and go right to work,” says Bill Bussard, a junior high school teacher who helps adults like Olin in his spare time.
“It’s a genuine blessing in my life to get to have a little piece of their success.”
For Olin, who plans to enroll at Spokane Community College next fall, the embarrassment is over.
“There’s no shame in admitting you don’t have a diploma,” says the dropout who dropped back in. “It’s just something you have to deal with and conquer.”
, DataTimes