âYou can have your job, you can have a career, or you can have your calling. The purpose of this whole thing is to get me to my calling, which is working in education.â
Melvin Williams Jr. has always been the kind of wildly impressive dad who could fix the roof himself, even build one from scratch if needed for his wife and three boys. But thatâs not where his ambitions lay. Melvin wanted to be able to help his college-aged son with a complex math algorithm. Melvin wanted his kids to be able to brag about his career to their friends. Melvin wanted to be an educator who could inspire local kids to dream big before they lost their spark. As an adult learner at the cutting-edge in Little Rock, Arkansas, and now as a bachelor-degree candidate in education at Reach University, Melvin has accomplished all this and more.
It wasnât so long ago that Melvin dropped out of high school. Growing up in inner-city Little Rock in the 1990s, Melvin was an âathlete-student,â as he puts it. And when a bad injury took him off the football field in 11th grade, he was written off as an athlete and fell by the wayside as a student. As Melvin explains, âeducation wasnât a thing unless you could go to school and play football.â All at once, Melvin lost both his sense of belonging and his educational pathway.
What followed was a decade of âdead-end jobsâ that barely allowed Melvin to support his young familyâhis wife, Symone, who was training to be a teacher, and their first-born son. His work ethic led to a manager role at the dollar store where, without a diploma, he worked twice as hard as his colleagues to prove himself. But minimum wage wasnât cutting it for Melvin and his family. He wanted to âtake control of [his] life.â
Melvinâs first step off the âstruggle bus,â as he puts it, came when he enrolled at the Excel Center, an innovative high school that gives adult learners the opportunity to earn a full-fledged high school degree. Melvin earned his diploma at Excel, and developed a whole new appreciation for education as a key to the futureâboth his own, and the future of kids who might be lost as students in the same way he once was.
Once he earned his diploma, Melvin stopped by the Excel Center one day simply to say thank you. Curiously, he was asked to come back the next dayâas in âhow about you stop by to say thank you tomorrow?â So he came back âtomorrow,â dressed in a shirt and tie, and found himself across a table from a state senator who wanted to hear about Melvinâs experience at Excel. Following the meeting, another surprise: Excel offered Melvin a job as a Recruitment and Retention Specialist.
âIt felt like a dream that Excel offered me a job,â Melvin recalls. Excel had not only given Melvin the opportunity of an education; it had given Melvin the chance to make his work about education. Melvin would now be working, day in and day out, to convince young people to value their education and complete their high school degrees at Excel. âI know you donât think education is important right now,â heâd tell potential recruits. âBut itâs about where you are when the music stops.â
While he was loving his work at Excel, Melvin enrolled in Pulaski Tech with plans to become a firefighter. He wished he could stay in education, but he figured the only way to maintain a full-time job and get a degree would be to settle for vocational school.
And then, as Melvin tells it, âit was like the Excel Center happened all over again, on a higher level.â Venus Torrence, 91´ŤĂ˝'s Manager of Arkansas School Partnerships, came to talk to Melvin and his colleagues at Excel about an innovative new program called an Apprenticeship Degree. As Melvin recalls, Venus asked the group: âHow would you like to teach in the classroom at Excel and get your education in education at the same time?â It was a âdream come trueâ for Melvin; âunbelievable,â really.
Melvin and his wife considered the opportunity. She said heâd be âvery foolish not to at least give it a shot.â He thought: âLetâs see if this really is my calling.â
He took his first classâDEP 50. Melvin was blown away.
I canât really find the words to describe the content of the education that was being delivered to me. And it wasnât setting me back financially. It was almost like it was what I was supposed to do, what I was born to do. Now youâre following the steps of your life. Now I could touch lives and deliver to this world. Reach most definitely lines up with that. The quality, the content, what we are being charged with being able to do for the future. Itâs out of this world.
In particular, Melvin notes the emphasis on critical thinking and collaboration within his Reach classes. Melvin is both learning this way and being trained to deliver education in this way. Itâs this two-tiered benefit that really strikes Melvin as remarkable.
Melvin would say that he often takes on the things that are the most difficult. With three kids at home and a full-time job at Excel, Melvin thought Reach would be one of these nearly impossible things. But thatâs not been his experience. To the contrary, âReach makes what would seem impossible to some people very easy for me.â
A few things have changed, but all in a good way. For one, he has Monday and Wednesday evening classes, so he cooks for the week on Sundays (âIâm a little healthier because of that!â) And he and his wife now share ideas about the research in education. In fact, the quality of Melvinâs degree program at Reach (heâs now in his third semester) has so impressed his wife, who has her own masterâs in education, that she is now considering getting involved with Reach too. And heâs also been able to give his own kids âthat edge at home,â both in helping with their math homework and in setting an example that college is a given for their family.
Melvin describes how even though heâs not credentialed yet as a teacher, the job-embedded aspect of the Apprenticeship Degree enables him to deliver training to teachers at Excel based on what he has learned through his Reach courses. This, in turn, has allowed Melvin to âfurther take his place as a leader at Excel,â where he has been promoted to Coordinator, works as a substitute teacher in the classroom, has the flexibility to work alongside paraprofessionals, and sits on the Excel Centerâs Leadership Team.
As he earns his degree through his job, Melvin is confident he is being equipped to navigate a career path either as a teacher within Excel or in the Arkansas public school system. He is eager to experience both paths as he prepares for his next most difficult thing: to be a middle school principal in Arkansas. He wants to âcatch students at that age where we start to lose some sparkââto help them, perhaps, become not just athlete-students, but also student-students.
âReach is the key to unlocking that big goal,â Melvin explains. In fact, âReach is breaking one of those traditional curses for people where you get a job, you make a livingâ but you arenât on an educational path toward upward mobility. âReach gives you control over your life.â
As Melvin tells it, Reach is setting him on his way toward a career in school administration, a previously unattainable goal that now feels within reach. And along the way, Melvin has accomplished a more personal goal: âNow my kids tell people: âMy dadâs a teacher.ââ
