Single mother Kristi Hargrove, 39, returned to campus in 2009 after dropping out following just one semester nine years earlier: “I was too young to know any better and too young to care,” she said.
Placed into remedial math, she struggled to keep up. But a series of personal upheavals — from her brother’s death to a broken engagement — culminated with Hargrove again dropping out earlier this year, 20 credits shy of her associate degree in nursing.
“The pressure just kicked in, and I had to quit school,” she said. “I call the Ozarks ‘quicksand.’ Once you’re here, you’re here (for good), and can’t make enough money to get out.”
Elizabeth Kusel, 42, returned to school at West Plains after first enrolling at a two-year school near her southern Oregon home more than a decade ago. A single mother, she lived in a women’s domestic violence shelter with her two sons, ages 8 and 9, after her divorce and is now an honors student with hopes of attending the University of Virginia and law school at Stanford.
She too had to survive Math 20, the remedial class that defeated too many of her fellow freshmen. Kusel sympathizes with those who don’t make it.
“There have been a lot of days I ask, ‘Why am I doing this?'” she said. “It would be so much easier to go get a dead-end job and pay everything off and not go through this.”
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