How Education Has Impacted Me and My Community: Jonathan Girard
2018-19 Scholarship Recipient
During many of my early education years, I had no real plan of execution in regards to my future. Like many of the young boys in America, and especially young black boys around the country, I thought that’d I’d be playing professional sports by the time I reached 18 or so. Playing in the NBA or NFL was my only dream and if that didn’t go as plan I’d be lost in this huge world, just like a lot of our black men are today. Fortunately, God blessed me with a mother who saw it fit to move our family out of the city, where these hoop dreams would only continue to develop, to the Hudson Valley where I soon recognized that there was way more opportunities than shooting or catching a ball for a living. Now, I am not judging those men and women who put their efforts towards playing professional sports by any means, but it was only after I moved out of the city that I realized just how limited one can be when they put all their eggs into one basket.
Moving to the Hudson Valley was just one step in my transformation into a young man who is eager to reform my own community. Blessed with the opportunity to attend a renowned boarding school as well as a prestigious college, I often visualize the many ways in which the Poughkeepsie community to be revitalized and repurposed into a habitat of excellence with the lessons that I have learned from both institutions. Attending Trinity Pawling School for three out of my four years high school, I realized just how outdated the NY public schooling system truly is. Not only does preparing students for a state exam limit the amount of information that they’ll retain; it also restricts the teachers from developing their own teaching style and relationships with their students. Adopting the practices of boarding schools like my alma mater, developing our own curriculums and allowing each teacher to personalize their classes within specific confines would benefit the students, faculty and the entire school in one breath.
Education within the Poughkeepsie community definitely needs tons of work done in order to produce the same successes of a boarding school like Trinity Pawling, but there are many other aspects of our ecosystem that is in need of due care. One concept that continues to infiltrate into my life is the power of networking. Whether I am looking to get an internship or joining a club at school, I have found that my network has paved ways for me in ways that I could never imagine. There have been times where someone has obtained a position or received something for free and I just sit there wondering how in the world they got what they got, and almost every time I find out that it was from their network. Since going to Trinity Pawling and stepping on the Trinity College campus, I make it a goal of mine to develop as many previous relationships as possible and meet as many new people every week that I can. It is definitely a goal that comes with difficulty, but I’ve come to truly understand that you just never know when that person in your network will come through for you. You may never think that you’ll need that person to help you out until you do. We as a community need to do everything in our power to help our young ones understand the importance of building a network and the ways in which they can use their connections to catapult them into major opportunities. A large majority of the networks of men and women in Poughkeepsie extend only as far as the town/city lines of Poughkeepsie, and that is not generating positive movement within the community in no way, shape or form.
I recognize that the opportunities that have come come my way are once in a lifetime. There are thousands of kids right in the area that I live that might never experience the things that I’ve experienced up to this day in time. I believe that with my blessings and opportunities it is my duty to break the mold and create a gateway for people in Poughkeepsie to be able to see that there is more than just living in Poughkeepsie for their entire lives. With the help of my brother and the rest of my family’s and network, I will get the job done.
