Jovan Lowe has “done everything but be a construction worker.” She’s been a cashier, a lumber specialist, a bank teller, a phone representative, a daycare worker, a dog walker, a face-painter, and a balloon twister. She’s sold vacuums door-to-door and even sold doors door-to-door! Hers is a story, though, not of a carefree dabbler hopping from job-to-job, but rather of a devoted daughter to an ailing mother. As Jovan explains, she did whatever would provide a schedule flexible enough for her to reach her mom on a moment’s notice, even if that meant straying far from her true goal: getting a bachelor’s degree.
With a son born in 2014, Jovan landed for several years squarely in the “Sandwich Generation,” caring for both a toddler and a parent at once. She had graduated from high school in 2002, but her mother was soon diagnosed with liver cancer, rendering her out-of-state college plans out-of-reach. Many times she started, and then stopped, community college.
Ever self-deprecating, Jovan chalks this all up to a simple “life happens, you know?” Put differently, of course, the higher education system failed Jovan, making it impossible for her to provide for her child and mother while at the same time completing her degree.
It was then that Jovan found the job-embedded liberal studies program at Reach University through which she could follow in her own mother’s footsteps and train to become a teacher. Jovan describes how the “professors and classes and community” Reach provides were absolutely essential to her success:
I get to Reach and I’m not feeling great, life is doing what she does. But within that community I had professors and classmates who encouraged me to keep on going—and I did. I had a 4.0 except for one course I really struggled with, so I had a 3.97. I’m really tough on myself. The professors and students were super encouraging, always telling me: ‘You can do it.’ I got there.
This support, combined with Reach’s radical affordability, made the degree possible for Jovan, then a self-described “single mom with limited income.” Throughout the program, Jovan was able to work as a paraprofessional at Peralta Elementary School near her home in Oakland, California, enabling her to continue to support her son.
Graduation was a “surreal moment” for Jovan. She had never believed it would happen. Indeed, she sat for graduation at Emerson Elementary, the very school where she had gone as a child, and where her mother had worked as a teacher throughout her childhood. “A full circle moment,” Jovan says.
With her degree and teacher certification now complete, Emerson is one of two schools where Jovan might teach next year. The other is her current employer: Jovan has been working at Peralta Elementary School throughout her years at Reach, bringing learnings from her coursework to her students along the way. Jovan notes, for example, that because of her computer science class at Reach, she can now code and bring that expertise to her students: “It’s the class that beat me up! But the skills I learned in that class I’m now using with my students. So the pay off was worth it.”
As Jovan tells it, this pay off simply would not have happened were it not for the personalized, wrap-around support she received through Reach and her partner school.
For one, there was the history professor her first semester, Dr. Cottrell-Williams, “an absolute delight,” who would text her to remind her to wake up early for class every week. The professor (“such a gem!”) went out of her way to connect on a personal level with each student in the class. For Jovan, it was their shared love of true crime podcasts that cemented the bond.
Then there was the principal partnering with Reach who secured a spot for Jovan’s son at the elementary school where she was working. That way, they could commute to school together, spending their days in neighboring 4th grade classrooms.
There were the teachers at Peralta who understood that Jovan wanted to be a teacher herself and thus allowed her “a little more freedom” in her role as a paraeducator to practice being a lead teacher: “Because Reach has the embedded work program, I got to practice things in real time and show my professors actual things I was going through, which made it a lot easier because I didn’t have to make up scenarios. It was my actual lived experience and they helped me problem-solve.”
And there was the math professor, Dr. Woodard, who was “just so kind and patient.” Jovan recalls getting quite frustrated and agitated when she didn’t understand something. Her teacher “didn’t judge me,” but would wait it out until Jovan was ready and would then say “let’s continue and walk through the process.” As Jovan recalls, “some of the techniques she used, I now use with my students. I’ll say: ‘You go ahead and have that moment. Now let’s get back to work.”
And yes, now there’s Jovan, the fully-fledged teacher who brings all of these lessons and experiences to bear in her own classroom. She describes one student who has really been struggling for years. This year, though, he’s excited for the first time for his parent-teacher conference. He’s no longer afraid to ask questions, he’s working on projects, and he’s taking the school’s chant—“persist and persevere”—to heart. As Jovan puts it: “With the encouragement of all the adults at the school, it finally sank into him.”
Perhaps the same could be said of Jovan. Having persisted and persevered through seemingly insurmountable obstacles for over two decades to earn her bachelor’s degree, Jovan embodies the schools’ chant more completely than anyone might have expected.
Jovan describes the final obstacle she is currently tackling—taking a 1.5 hour “huge commute” every morning—to her job at Peralta Elementary. But it’s worth it, she says, for her ultimate goal to teach middle school “in the community that helped to create me.” Why middle school? “Because that is when you start to realize you can make an impact on the world—and if you have the right people to help you do that, you can get started.”