Adult education center hopes to reunite with community ‘family’
For more than four decades, the Opportunities Industrialization Center of Oklahoma County offered adult education classes and skills training in a building in the historic Deep Deuce area of Oklahoma City.
While the center’s location changed a few years ago, OIC continues to “motivate, inspire and educate people to become their best selves,” said DesJean Jones, the agency’s executive director.
Jones said OIC is preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary with a “family reunion” of sorts.
She is inviting past and present students, staff, board members, volunteers and their families to join in an “OIC Family Reunion” set for 7 p.m. July 22 at Taft Stadium, 2501 N May.
Jones said the OIC family will be able to visit and participate in various activities at the OKC Energy FC men’s soccer game against the Colorado Springs Switchbacks.
Along the way, she is hoping to introduce OIC to a new generation of people who may not know much about it.
Jones said OIC offers classes for people who wish to take the high school equivalency exam, often referred to as the GED. OIC is also one of a few metro-area testing sites for the exam.
The center, currently at 3033 N Walnut, also offers literacy classes for low-level readers and non-readers, as well as training for people who plan to tutor low-level and non-readers.
Jones said OIC also offers computer skills classes and other training, including an “Exit to Success” course designed to help individuals find the path to the career of
their choice.
Educating community
What is an adult learner?
Jones said they are typically individuals whose circumstances, for whatever reason, did not
include traditional education.
“These are people that life happened to and as a community, we have a responsibility not just to them but to ourselves to help them get to the next stage,” she said.
She said OIC was on the cutting edge when it began because its leaders believed it was important to offer educational opportunities to adults who somehow missed them earlier in life.
“We understood that you can’t leave these populations out of the American dream — and there’s room for them,” Jones said.
Staff at the center become part of the adult learner’s much-needed support network.
Jones said this network is critical because adult learners too often fear that success will elude them forever and that they don’t deserve it in the first place.
Jones said many of them, however, have done amazing things despite less than ideal circumstances and she always points this out to them.
One student, for example, owned her own business and provided for her family for many years even though she could not read. Jones said another student dropped out of high school to care for her younger siblings because of her mother’s drug addiction.
Jones said each of these women found their way to OIC and onto a path to success.
She noted that OIC wasn’t intended to be the last stop on the students’ journeys. Along those lines, Jones proudly said 57 percent of the 2017 OIC graduating class are enrolled in college.
Meanwhile, she said a portion of the proceeds from the July 22 family reunion event will be distributed to OIC.
“I want everybody who has ever been associated with us to come out and see that we are still in this thing. I want them to see that we are thriving,” she said. “I also want the folks who don’t know us yet to get to know what we are doing, so we are super excited.”