A Goal Achieved
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
STEPHENVILLE, Texas — That day in 2017 was much the same as most in Cynthia Kappas’ 24-year retail career.
She came to work in the custom frame shop of the Fort Worth location of a national chain store and responded to a customer who needed a diploma framed.
A Tarleton State University diploma.
She and the new graduate began a conversation. The topic got around to long-ago dreams. A lot of water had run under the bridge since Cynthia graduated from Chisholm Trail Academy in Keene as part of the Class of 1978.
“I told him I’d always wanted to be a teacher,” she said, “and he told me I should do it.”
So she did.
With an eye toward being an educator, she came to Tarleton’s Fort Worth campus to finish the degree she started 40 years before.
After earning her high school diploma, she took classes for a semester at Southwest Adventist University in Keene, then spent a semester at Hill College before beginning at Tarleton in 1980.
“I wanted to be a history teacher,” she said. “They told me I couldn’t unless I was a P.E. coach, too, and I wasn’t really interested in that.”
She was, however, interested in agriculture, and she began classes in that major, still thinking she would eventually teach. Almost four years later, with just three classes left before graduation, the recently married Cynthia learned she was pregnant.
“After that baby came another,” she said, “so I took that horticulture minor I had worked toward and opened a flower shop. I thought the time had come and gone for college.”
After the babies and a few more years came a divorce, which prompted her to move her family to California. She lived there more than two decades before returning to her roots in Fort Worth where her interest in a classroom career sprang up again. Actually, it never died.
“I needed to finish my degree, but I was working full time, so I couldn’t commute to the Stephenville campus. It had to be something I could do in Fort Worth and online.”
Additionally, some of the classes she’d taken decades before were no longer valid toward her degree. She needed 31 hours to earn her bachelor’s in general studies.
With the help of her adviser, Angela White, and Erica Robinson, advising and program manager of community outreach for Tarleton in Fort Worth, they devised a plan.
“Erica and everyone at the Fort Worth campus was so helpful,” Cynthia said. “Angela was the one who helped me get all the courses I needed and helped me figure out the technical stuff. I could not have done it without Angela. They were both so gracious.”
Even while working 40 hours a week at the frame shop, she accumulated the necessary credit hours in less than a year, earning recognition on the Dean’s List, to boot.
At graduation ceremonies in August, she joined other students, most of them a generation younger, in receiving her diploma. “That thrilled me so much because I waited 40 years to walk across that stage and get that purple jacket with my diploma in my hand.”
Cynthia is down to a day a week at the frame shop, two days a week substitute teaching in Fort Worth schools, and she’s part of the fall cohort of the Tarleton Model of Accelerated Teacher Education.
When she finishes the TMATE program she’ll be a social studies teacher with provisional certification, plus she’ll have 18 hours toward her new goal of a master’s degree.
“My situation is my age, but someone else may have a different situation that could keep them from going to college,” she said. “The people at Tarleton make sure you know they are there to help you achieve your goals.”
Even if it takes a while.
Tarleton, founding member of The Texas A&M University System, provides a student-focused, value-driven education marked by academic innovation and a dedication to transform today’s scholars into tomorrow’s leaders. It offers degree programs to more than 13,000 students at Stephenville, Fort Worth, Waco, Midlothian, RELLIS Academic Alliance in Bryan, and online, emphasizing real-world learning experiences that address societal needs while maintaining its core values of tradition, integrity, civility, excellence, leadership and service.
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Contact: Phil Riddle, News & Information Specialist
817-484-4415
[email protected]
