June 28, 2019 3p
(WGTD)---28 year-old Dravail Wesley dropped out of high school as a senior. An attempt made a few years later to finish up ended in failure as well. But on Thursday, Wesley was one of 13 Racine area residents who were celebrating with friends and family after receiving their High School Equivalency Diploma at Gateway Technical College. Under a new grant, the program in Racine may triple in size over the next 18 months.
For Dravail, completing the equivalency program wasn't easy---he said he nearly walked out of math class on the first day. "But the teacher said no, no, no!," Weley recalled. He says he sat down and did the math problem in question and wound up being the only student in class to get it right. The boost of confidence propelled him to finish the program.
He was the student speaker at Thursday's graduation ceremony.
Jake Gorges is the Adult Education Manager for the YWCA and leads the program. He says getting the equivalency degree is often times more rewarding for the recipients than if they’d taken the traditional path. "These individuals have had a lot of life," Gorges told us. "And they've had it where the world has kind of hit them between the eyes a couple of times," he said. Completing the program for many of them, he says, is a ticket to a higher-paying and a more secure job.
Dravail, for example, grew up poor with six sibblings in a single-parent household, bouncing frequently between houses, apartments and schools. He latched on to a job at McDonald's and became a manager--but only after lying about having a high school diploma. The fib didn't work when he went to Gateway to enroll in LPN classes to build upon is status as a CNA. That's when he signed up for the equivalency program.
Now he plans to tell others about it and how the program can change lives.
The organizers--Gateway, the YWCA and the county and the city--are in a recruitment mode, believing the best way to fill the skills gap and secure higher incomes for residents begins with a high school diploma. But thousands of adults living in Racine County don't have that piece of paper.
The City of Racine recently won a grant to help fund an initiative to add an extra 250 residents over the next 18 months to the rolls of those with diplomas. Organizers have developed a strategy to locate and recruit residents who lack a diploma.
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