There’s hope when all seems lost

WASILLA — Life hasn’t been easy for Amy Evans, a 31-year-old who had dropped out of high school and turned to drugs for a time after losing her first born to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

But in two short months, Evans will graduate from Charter College’s medical assistant program and begin a new life filled with hope for the future.

“It’s been a very long, hard road for me, but I am so excited to be graduating soon,” Evans said.

For the past eight months, she has worked full-time in the Carrs’ seafood department while attending Charter College and raising her four daughters and son.

Evans, who comes from a family of seven, became pregnant as a ninth-grader at Palmer High School and transferred to Burchell High because it had a day care facility on site. All was going relatively well — until her baby daughter died from SIDS at 7 months old.

“When I lost my daughter, my world fell apart,” she said. “I dropped out of school and started drinking and doing drugs. Then when I was 18 I had my second daughter and just struggled by working fast food and home care, working two jobs and trying to make ends meet.”

When she was pregnant with her youngest child five years ago, her younger brother died in a car accident. That was the last straw.

“I couldn’t handle it at all,” she said. “After my son was born, I started doing meth for the next year-and-a-half and left my kids and my boyfriend. I felt like I had nothing to live for. It was horrible, absolutely horrible.”

That’s when she finally got in touch with Family Promise Mat-Su in 2007. The faith-based organization was brought to the Valley by First Presbyterian Church in Wasilla to help homeless families get back on their feet.

Family Promise convinced her to seek drug treatment so they could then help her get her kids and life back on track. It worked.

She got a steady job at Carrs in 2009 and began saving money for her children’s college fund, she said.

“My kids kept telling me I shouldn’t be preaching at them to go to college when I never even made it out of high school,” she said. “Last December I heard a Charter College ad on the radio and I immediately drove over there.”

As soon as she talked to Charter College Director of Admissions Patrick Murphy, she said she knew her life was going to change for the better.

Murphy told her about the college’s Ability to Benefit (ATB) program and how she could take assessments to see if she’d be eligible for federal financial aid to help her get through the medical assistant program.

They would also encourage her to work on earning her GED certificate by going through the Palmer organization Human Resource Company (HRC).

Potential Charter College enrollees are given three chances to score a certain level on the ATB math and language arts tests, and are provided one-on-one tutoring for support along the way, Murphy said.

“If they pass those tests, it shows us they have the maturity level and ability to be successful in college classes,” Murphy said. “The biggest piece is counseling. We offer periodic sessions with myself, and the dean of education, and the director of career services. Earning their GED, in addition to their certificate, makes them even more employable when they graduate.”

That’s exactly what Evans wants.

Working in the health field — whether it’s for the elderly, children or anyone in between — is Evans’ calling, she said.

“I’m excited to show my kids that if you work hard enough and stay focused on your goals, you can do just about anything,” she said, adding she hopes Charter College adds a registered nurse’s program soon so that she can go even farther toward her new dream. “It hasn’t been easy, but I’m almost done with this phase. I was really scared at first because it had been so long since I’d been in school. But I found that a lot of the math came back to me and now I know this is what I’m supposed to do.”

For more information on Charter College’s programs, call Patrick Murphy at 352-1000 or visit the Charter College website at chartercollege.edu.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.