Perseverance, patience pay off for 57-year-old Lemoyne grad
BARBARA BURNSIDE’S JOURNEY to and through LeMoyne -Owen College has been a long one.
“They said there’s a college up (Highway) 61 and turn right on Walker,” Burnside remembers someone told her. “So one day, I drove up here.”
That was in 2000 and she was driving from Clarksdale, Miss. She found LeMoyne and in the professors and faculty, folks who felt like family. The mother of two, then in her mid-40s, enrolled for the semester.
But on the third day of classes, her car broke down.
Working as a Headstart bus driver and in a series of other low-wage jobs, she couldn’t afford to fix the car and couldn’t find someone to carry her back and forth on the 150-mile round trip.
“I told myself I was coming back here one day,” she said. All these years, she’s kept the course catalog from the 1999-2000 school year, now yellowed and dog- eared.
Burnside’s story could have ended there, as does the tale of so many older students trying to get a college degree. It wouldn’t be her fault, and we’d all understand, She’d tried but then life happened and then, the end. Except it wasn’t. Fast-forward nine years. Burnside was still working low-wage jobs but
she was ready to return to LeMoyne -Owen. She had a 2000 Saturn and enrolled in the school’s Accelerated Degree Completion Program, which would let her top off the couple of years she’d had at community colleges with enough classes to get a degree in business.
On the first day of classes, she got a flat tire.
“I said, I’m not going to let this stop me again.” So she didn’t. Burnside came up with a plan to get to her classes, which met on Saturdays.
She’d board a bus in Clarksdale on Friday, around 9:30 p.m. headed to the Downtown Greyhound station.
She’d spend the night at the bus station and wake by 6 a.m., when she’d walk to Front to catch a city bus to campus.
Burnside would wait until the campus opened around 7 a.m., attend her classes from 8-12 and then head back to the Greyhound station.
But she would have just missed the bus to go back to Clarksdale, which means she’d have to wait hours for the next one.
It was a journey she made for four months, until Dr. Joey Edwards, director of the Accelerated Degree Completion Program, noticed her one Saturday morning. Outside the gates. In the cold.
Prodded, she told him about the buses. If she could just cobble together several weeks’ worth of the $30 bus fares, he thought, she’d have the $200 she needed for car repairs.
But $200 was Burnside’s income for an entire week. It was a stretch to come up with bus fare. Amassing an emergency fund was out of the question.
“I loaned her the $200 to fix her car and told her she didn’t have to pay me back unless she absolutely could afford it,” Edwards said. “She paid me back every penny of it. … She went that entire