Mich. grandmother adds new title: Graduate
Melinda Sporea earns high school diploma at 70
DETROIT — The reasons that Melinda Sporea did not earn a high school diploma were numerous.
There was no time to return to school. She was married, had a family of five to raise, and ran her own hair salon.
Sporea was not a good fit with all the younger students who had some high school credits, while she had zero and needed all 22 to graduate.
It was just too hard. Sporea tried three adult education programs over the years but found the coursework too challenging. She was embarrassed and gave up.
Yet the desire to finish high school never left Sporea, who watched children and grandchildren graduate over the years.
In fact, it nagged at her each passing year until 2016, when Sporea enrolled again — this time in an adult education program at Utica Community Schools, where her daughter once worked — to begin the arduous journey of getting a high school diploma.
This time, she completed the journey, and on June 6, at age 70, she reached her long-sought goal of becoming a high school graduate, joining other members of the Macomb County district’s Class of 2021.
To get it done, Sporea attended class four days a week during the afternoon, tackling a full four-year curriculum of math and English, biology and social studies, financial literacy and international history.
There were tears over math problems, late nights studying for tests and essays to write on subjects she was learning about for
the first time, from author Laura Ingalls Wilder to planetary systems.
Even the pandemic, which forced the closure of Sporea’s school in March of her third year and her entire “senior” year, could not stop the Warren grandmother from getting her diploma.
Her story is one of rigor, grit and resilience, going back again and again to her belief that education is vitally important.
“I had to teach my kids what was best,” Sporea said. “You need your education. Reach your goal. Don’t
stop.”
Sporea’s perseverance has inspired her teachers, her husband, her children and anyone else who knows her, and stood witness to the difficult journey of an older adult completing a high school education.
“I am so proud of her. I would come over and she always updated me on what she was learning, and that was really cool for her to share that with me,” daughter Krystal Andrzejewski said. “She loves learning, and it’s inspiring because it is very rare for someone at this age to take a four-year course and finish it.”
Sporea recalled how the first day of class with a teacher drove her to tears.
“They had chalkboards, and you had to do your math problem on them. You had to show her to see if it was correct,” she said. “I never did this kind of math in my life. I lifted it up and burst out crying. I said: ‘I don’t belong here. What am I doing here?’ ”
Then she started thinking. “This has been my goal forever. I have grandkids. I gotta go for it. I gotta do it no matter what,” Sporea said.
When Sporea was young, her life was not easy. Her father died when she was 2. She lived with her mother and two siblings, attending school but also working at a grocery store in southwest Detroit, which turned into a full-time job. Around eighth grade, Sporea’s mother said she could stop attending school.
Later in life she met Ted Sporea, “her prince charming,” got married and had five children. She attended the Katrina College of Beauty while raising three kids and received a cosmetology certificate in 1987.
She had two more children and worked for other hair salons, managing them, and soon started her own business, Melinda’s Unisex Hair Magic in Warren.
During the last adult education school she attended in the 1990s, other students threw things behind her head during class. She could not concentrate and left, feeling out of place and defeated again.
“How can I study and how can I get through this?” Sporea said.
When she went back in 2016, she made note cards to study and hit the books every night, declining invitations from family to attend barbecues because she needed the time to study.
There were tough days during the next four years but Sporea said once she was in the program, she never thought about giving up.
“I wanted to learn things I never knew in my life. That kind of motivated me,” Sporea said. “I would tell my daughter, ‘I never knew this and I am so happy I know about this now.’ How the world was, the rocks, the environmental science.”
Ted, 72, a retired machine repair tech, says school was a challenge for his wife.
“School-wise, I could not help much,” he said. “I forgot almost everything. She basically did it on her own.”
Once her studies got underway at Utica, Sporea developed confidence and began to help other students with their school work, including math.
“I would look at the students and said, ‘I will help you.’ They encouraged me, they helped me. I felt like all the students were my kids. I loved them to pieces,” Sporea said.
She said she enjoyed learning at home remotely during the pandemic, despite the challenges of not being in front of a teacher.
“I just wanted to finish,” Sporea said. “It was so hard for me.”
Oldest daughter Elizabetha Sancen worked as an assistant for adult students learning English in the same building where her mom attended adult education classes. Sancen is the one who got her mom to try again.
“I told her I would pay for her registration fee,” Sancen said. “That motivated her. That did the trick.”
The classes were never easy for her mother, Sancen said, but she came in even if she didn’t feel well.
Four years later, her mother has reached her goal and Sancen is grateful to have watched her do it.
“I am so proud of her I feel like my own kid is graduating,” she said. “It gets me choked up to see her in her cap and gown. It is very moving. She has been through a lot in her life.”
Asked what advice she would give others in the same position as she was four years ago, Sporea answers without missing a beat.
“I would tell them, ‘Go for it. It’s never too late,’ ” she says. “Share your dreams with me. If I did it, you can too.”