David Muscan '11 earned his nursing degree at age 36.

Adult learning at EMU doesn’t begin and end with the Adult Degree Completion Program – older students regularly enroll in the university’s traditional undergraduate programs. Sometimes it’s because they’re after a particular degree not offered through ADCP. Or because they lack sufficient college-level credits (ADCP students must start the program with at least 60 semester hours of previously earned credit). Or because they’re simply interested and able to become fulltime students later in life.

It was all of these factors that put Keith Zimmerman ’10 back in the classroom. Zimmerman, who was 37 when he finished his degree in biochemistry, became a father at age 17, forcing him to put his college plans on hold. After supporting himself as a massage therapist for nearly a decade while his children were young, Zimmerman began at EMU as a nursing student.

Before long, he switched gears to biochemistry after a general chemistry course rekindled his interest, dating back to junior high, in biomedical research. One of the highlights of his undergraduate career was a research project with biology professor Greta Ann Herin examining the NR1 and NR2b NMDA receptors (“really fascinating” stuff, Zimmerman claims).

Several months after finishing his senior year – also, as it happened, daughter Alyshia Zimmerman’s (class of 2013) first year at EMU – Zimmerman took a job as a research assistant in the Laurie Laboratory at the University of Virginia, where he’s exploring the use of the protein lacritin to treat dry eyes. “I’m finding this job extremely fulfilling,” he said. “This is the job that I’ve wanted since the eighth grade.”

The college experience as an older student isn’t without its challenges. David Muscan ’11, who was 36 when he graduated with a nursing degree, said he sensed that professors sometimes had higher expectations of him than younger students. Muscan, originally from Romania, came to EMU in 2007 from Hungary, where his work as a missionary for the previous decade had kept him too busy to finish college. Now working as a nurse at Rockingham Memorial Hospital, Muscan said that a few other older classmates made the non-traditional undergraduate experience seem easier, and that through his classes, he made close friends with students aged 18 to 50.

Forty years before Muscan finished, Wayne Lawton ’71 completed a non-traditional college career of his own. After a decade in ministry in various locations across the country, he landed as a pastor in Waynesboro, Virginia. Soon afterwards, in 1969, Lawton began at EMU. (Thanks to previous college classes, he only needed a little more than a year of classes to earn his degree.)

In an email sent to Crossroads Lawton recalled a time when he sheepishly approached a math professor for help with his studies. The professor, Wilmer Lehman, replied, “When you pastor a church, do you mind people coming to you for help?” When Lawton said no, Lehman responded, “Well, I don’t mind helping you.”

“I survived the course, and even passed,” said Lawton, now pastor of Cedar Hill Community Church in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

Lawton, who has taken occasional classes through Eastern Mennonite Seminary since finishing college, said he’s thought about capping his non-traditional education by finishing up his seminary degree, well into his seventies. “Life isn’t over yet,” he said, chuckling.

It’s about what happened to his brother Carl, younger by 11 years, a “gentle soul” and a talented musician with a promising career ahead of him. Carl was in his mid-20s when the first symptoms of mental illness became apparent, so severe his life began to unravel. Carl struggled to keep a job. His musical ambitions were interrupted.

In 1995, on the advice of his public defender, Carl pleaded guilty to criminal charges after the owner of a car he’d borrowed reported the vehicle stolen. He served a three-month sentence followed by a period of parole. All the while, his illness continued to get worse.

While still under parole, Carl began placing strange phone calls to numbers picked at random from the phone book. More criminal charges followed. Parole was revoked in 1998. With a clear history of serious mental illness, and without having ever committed a violent crime, Carl entered the state corrections system on a two- to six-year sentence.

There, with inconsistent and ineffective treatment under the supervision of the prison system – not an organization with a primary focus on mental health care – Carl entered a final downward spiral. He acted erratically, antagonized other inmates, got written up for misconduct and wound up in the Restricted Housing Unit, where he shared a seven- by nine-foot cell with an inmate who had a violent past. The two were allowed outside the cell no more than five hours per week – a situation not unlike “dropping a goldfish into a shark pond,” as it was later described in legal correspondence with the Scherer family.

On the morning of August 6, 2002, Carl’s descent through the cracks of the system reached it’s tragic conclusion. After quarrelling over their morning breakfast rations, Carl’s cellmate beat him to death. “It was deeply painful. I didn’t know how to cope or deal with the pain,” said Scherer, an electrical technician at Armstrong World Industries, where he’s worked for three decades.

A month after Carl died, an ad for the Lancaster Area Victim Offender Reconciliation Program caught Pete’s eye. He trained to become a mediator with the organization, and in the process, decided to finish his bachelor’s degree. The following February, he entered the management and organizational development program at EMU’s Lancaster site.

But Carl’s death, and the systemic failures it made achingly clear, hovered over Pete. With more than 20 percent of Pennsylvania’s 50,000 prisoners suffering from some kind of mental illness, the next incident, and then the next and the next, were waiting to happen. Something had to be done.

So Pete sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in federal court, alleging that it had violated Carl’s constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment by neglecting to properly treat Carl’s mental illness while he was in custody. His intention was never to exact simple retribution, or simply seek compensatory damages.

No, Pete wanted to “light a candle in the darkness.” He wanted Carl’s death to keep the next Carl from dying, and days before the action went to trial, the parties reached a remarkable settlement: the Department of Corrections agreed to launch an effort to reform its treatment of inmates suffering from mental illness.

In July 2009, an advisory board including Pete, mental health advocates and Department of Corrections staff formed Support for Inmates with Mental Illness, or SIMI, with a mission to “provide hope and support for mentally ill offenders and their families.”

The group has since launched a pilot program to facilitate better communication between inmates with mental illness, their families, corrections staff and mental health workers at Pennsylvania’s Waymart prison, with a goal of coordinating effective care and support for mentally ill inmates. (On a related note, for a senior project at Penn State University, Pete’s daughter, Antoinette, helped conduct a survey of mental health workers within the state corrections system, which identified specific areas with potential for improvement in the way the department handles inmates with mental illness.)

Two years into the SIMI effort, Pete has been encouraged by enthusiastic response from individual psychologists and other staff within the Department of Corrections. At the same time, he’s been frustrated by theslow pace of change within the organization as a whole. It’s a challenge with direct bearing on Pete’s degree in organizational development from EMU.

Pete Scherer (left), with lawyer Dwight Yoder, applied what he learned in ADCP about organizational development to pressure the prison system to change.

“The [department] as a whole has a lot of great people, but someone at the level of a psychologist doesn’t have any input up or down to change the process,” said Pete, who is convinced that a less linear, hierarchical decision-making system could vastly improve state prisons’ treatment of mentally ill inmates without adding to its budget.

“It’s a classic organizational development issue that can be addressed with the right strategy,” he said.

Over the past two years, Pete, sometimes accompanied by Antoinette and wife Marceline, has travelled across Pennsylvania meeting with corrections staff and others involved, driven by his desire to improve the situation of the state’s inmates with mental illness and their families.

“We’ve tried to translate [the family’s] dedication into real initiatives within the Department of Corrections that will enhance family contact and communications for our most seriously mentally ill offenders,” said Dr. Jack Walmer, a retired Chief of Psychological Services with the Department of Corrections who’s worked closely with Pete on the SIMI project. “I admire Pete’s dedication, combined with his real world, pragmatic understanding of the possibilities and, at times, limitations of moving ahead with a new initiative such as this.”

So much has happened in less than a decade, yet there is still so much to do. Pete, who is also a real estate agent in addition to his full-time work with Armstrong, keeps spending his spare time crisscrossing the state, developing and promoting SIMI. And progress does continue to come, in bits and pieces. In June, the Department of Corrections decided to start a second SIMI pilot program at Muncy State Correctional Institution, a women’s prison.

And the fact that SIMI exists at all, according to Dwight Yoder, the attorney who represented Pete in his suit against the state prison system, is a testament to Pete’s vision for something good to emerge from his brother’s mishandling and brutal death.

“Peter was able to use Carl’s death to bring healing to his own family and a lot of other families through this program,” said Yoder. “Through [Carl’s] death, the Department of Corrections is on a path to change how it deals with inmates with mental illness.”

Dr. Michael Murphy earned his bachelor's degree through ADCP.

Michael Murphy ’97 felt his career as a database manager and technologist at Alcoa (Aluminum) Home Exteriors in Stuarts Draft, Virginia, hitting a ceiling for lack of a bachelor’s degree. His decision to enroll in one of the first classes offered through EMU’s then-new Adult Degree Completion Program, though, launched him on an entirely different career track.

“It really turned out to be a life-changing event for me. I’m not sure I would have gotten into the education field had I not gone back [to EMU] and gotten my degree, and had some of the experiences that I did,” said Murphy, now an assistant professor in the department of teacher education at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina.

Murphy’s capstone project during his undergraduate studies at EMU involved an examination of the use of technology in local school systems. He was struck by how slowly the schools seemed to be adopting new technologies. As an early user of email and the Internet, he was convinced that these would soon be a part of the everyday working world, and that, accordingly, schools should prepare students to use them.

“It kind of opened my eyes to the fact that there was a huge disconnect between what was going on in education, and what people understood about technology, and how it was being used [in the classroom],” he said.

The experience soon developed into an interest in becoming a teacher himself.

After EMU, Murphy went on to Marshall University in West Virginia, where he worked as director for regional computing and completed a master’s degree in secondary education. At the encouragement of a graduate professor, he kept right on, eventually earning a doctor of education degree in 2008, with a concentration on education technology.

Since then, he’s been teaching undergraduate- and graduate- level courses at Lander University and researching in the field of educational technology. Murphy’s recent research projects have included a study of the use of technology in early childhood education in Montessori schools, and the development of survey software that allows Lander’s education department to collect and analyze data on individual students’ progress through the program. After spending a year setting up the system with the university’s IT department, the system has proved of value to Lander’s process of re-accreditation, Murphy said.

“I love being in a teaching school,” said Murphy. “It’s a real community of learning that takes us far beyond what happens in the classroom.”

Now 15 years removed from his time as an EMU student, Murphy said the example of interactive learning between students and teachers, set by one of his professors, Terry Whitmore ’70, MBA, has proved to be an enormous influence on his teaching style.

“I’ve carried that with me for years, and always try to make my [own] classes interactive,” Murphy said.

United Methodist pastor Nona Allen '11 was one of four graduates to speak at EMU's 2011 commencement ceremony.

On a rainy Sunday in May 2011, Nona Allen ’11, representing the Adult Degree Completion Program (ADCP), was one of four graduates to speak at EMU’s commencement. Allen, the pastor of four United Methodist congregations near Elkton, Virginia, was 62 when she earned her degree – an undertaking motivated in part by her desire to inspire her family and congregations to set their sights high.

“If other people saw me at my age going back and getting a degree, they would feel like they could reach for the stars,” said Allen. “I wanted to do it to set a standard for my children and my grandchildren.”

In the crowd listening to Allen’s address that day was her nephew and fellow management and organizational development major, Chad Ellinger ’11 – another ADCP graduate with a reach-high story of his own.

Chad Ellinger '11, who was seriously injured during his service as a Marine sergeant in Iraq, graduated alongside his aunt, Nona Allen.

On November 9, 2004, during a battle in Fallujah, Iraq, an explosion toppled a stone wall onto Marine Sergeant Ellinger. He lay pinned beneath a pillar with internal injuries and a broken arm, pelvis and leg, until other soldiers freed him and dragged him into a nearby school building. After being driven out of the battle zone (a medical corpsman laid on top of Ellinger during the ride, to shield him from incoming bullets), Ellinger drifted in and out of consciousness for the next five days, during which he was flown to Germany before being transferred to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

After months of recovery there, Ellinger returned home to Staunton, Virginia, to continue his rehabilitation. In 2007, he became the first intern in a then-new Virginia Department of Transportation work program for wounded veterans. Ellinger, who still walks with a limp, now works as a contract administrator for VDOT’s Staunton District, where he manages equipment and 28 fuel locations scattered throughout the Valley. He lives in Staunton, with his wife Kascie, 6-year-old daughter Morgan, and year-old son Tripp.

When Ellinger decided to finish a bachelor’s degree, in order to broaden his career options in the future, he was attracted to ADCP because of its good reputation and the prompt and well-organized staff response when he first inquired for more information. Ellinger said his organizational development classes in particular were excellent, providing him with new insight and significant practical application to his job at a large state agency. He also said he learned a lot about how an adult workforce learns and retains information, and how large organizations can, and should, address problems like low morale.

Most enjoyable, though, was being a part of a group of adults facing – and overcoming – the challenge of finishing a college education as nontraditional students while juggling work and family responsibilities. “This day and age, people don’t look for challenges enough,” Ellinger said. “I don’t think you’re ever too old to continue to learn, and the brightest people in the world understand that.”

And for proof, he needed to look no further than at his Aunt Nona, addressing the crowd on graduation day.

“It meant a tremendous amount to me when I found out Chad and I were graduating at the same time,” said Allen (though they graduated together, Ellinger and Allen were in different ADCP cohorts).

As a pastor, Allen said she’s considering following up with a seminary degree.

“Age is only a number,” said Allen, who cites “The Karate Kid,” a film she watched with her grandchildren, and the Justin Bieber song “Never Say Never” on its sound track, as some of her influences. “In life sometimes we give up too soon. We should keep on trying. If you want something bad enough, you can make it happen.”

Joyce Wharton '05, Linda Welk '05 and Ginger Estes '08 drove over an hour each way from their homes in Rappahannock County to classes in Harrisonburg.

Once a week, as soon as Ginger Estes ’08 had finished her route and parked the school bus at 4:30 in the afternoon, she’d hop straight into her own car for the 50- mile, twisting drive over two mountain ranges to Harrisonburg from her home in Rappahannock County, Virginia. Rain, shine or snow, she made it to her ADCP classes every week for 15 months, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2008.

“I wouldn’t have been able to [earn my degree] if it wasn’t for this program. We had been out of school for almost 20 years,” said Estes, gesturing at her colleagues Joyce Wharton ’05 and Linda Welk ’05 seated beside her in a classroom at Rappahannock County Elementary School.

The three women all worked in the county school system before and during their undergraduate studies at ADCP: Welk and Wharton were substitute teachers, and Estes was a bus driver and aide. Since graduating from the program, however, they’ve all become teachers within the same school division, earning significantly higher salaries.

Wharton now teaches fifth grade, while Welk and Estes are both special education teachers. (Wharton’s and Estes’ working lives together go back considerably farther, to when they were both employed at Aileen, a textile plant in Rappahannock County that shut down in the mid-nineties.)

A fourth Rappahannock County school employee, Pat Lawler ’05, is also an ADCP graduate, now working as a special education instructional aide, and together, the group is encouraging various other colleagues to consider the program.

“There was such a diverse group of people [at EMU],” said Wharton, who enjoyed the encouragement and energy provided by younger classmates in her ADCP cohort.

As part of their final projects for their degrees at EMU, the three women completed research projects related to their interest in teaching: Wharton looked at substitute teaching, Estes researched special education teaching strategies, and Welk finished a project on a technique called “mastery learning” that attracted the interest of administrators at the school. All three women said the program’s flexibility, and the instructors’ respect for the demands of full-time jobs and family obligations, were key to their success.

Brandy Jenkins '07 went from working in a bank to her dream job of schoolteaching, boosted by ADCP.

“[ADCP] is a really good opportunity for people who have to work while they’re taking classes,” said Brandy Jenkins ’07, an eighth grade English teacher at Page County Middle School, where she is 20 minutes closer to Harrisonburg than the Rappahannock teachers – she had just one mountain range to cross to get to EMU.

Though Jenkins had worked at a bank rather than in the school system while she earned her degree from EMU, like Estes, Welk and Wharton, she went on to a career in teaching after graduation. Jenkins said she’d always been drawn to education, even while she worked in the business world. “I took the long and winding road to reach my destination.”

Jenkins, who began a family and worked full-time during her transition to teaching, said the structure of ADCP, designed for working adults, was also ideal for her.

“The flexibility of the program made it possible for my life to continue while I finished my degree,” she said.

While these graduates of ADCP finished with bachelor’s degrees in management and organizational development, all of them required further certification to become licensed teachers in Virginia. Jenkins completed licensure at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, while Welk and Wharton were licensed through a program offered by the Virginia Department of Education. Estes is currently finishing her licensure requirements through an online program of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

And now, looking back, all of them – Estes, Welk, Wharton and Jenkins – say the late nights and long drives were worth it.

“I was the epitome of a non-traditional student,” said Jenkins, who grew up in Page County and once took ninth grade science in the very classroom she now teaches in. “Even though I took the long and winding road to reach my destination, I would do it all again exactly the same way.”

Mildred Garcia '10 is a labor and delivery nurse with aspirations.

Mildred Garcia ’10 does not mince words when it comes to her experience in the RN to BS degree in nursing program at EMU’s Lancaster campus.“It definitely was 100 times better than what I expected,” she said. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t even think twice about it.”

Garcia, who now works as a labor and delivery nurse at the Heart of Lancaster hospital in Lititz, Pennsylania, originally entered EMU’s program to earn a BSN with the intent of going to midwifery school.
“I’m a very social person. I love the patient contact,” she said. “[As a labor and delivery nurse] I’m part of a very intimate experience … I feel very privileged to be a part of that.”

Plans changed along the way, though, after several of Garcia’s classes at EMU sparked a new interest in teaching. Garcia now plans to pursue a master’s in nursing education and wants to work in nursing curriculum development and training within a hospital.

Bea Benson '05 was attracted by EMU's commitment to Christian values.

Though the bulk of her working hours are spent reviewing medical charts for thoroughness and compliance with insurance requirements, Bea Benson ’05 insists her job is full of excitement. “I really love it … there’s never a dull moment,” said Benson, a clinical documentation specialist at Augusta Health in Fishersville, Virginia.

Benson has worked at Augusta Health since 1988, when she began as a secretary. She soon finished a RN degree at Blue Ridge Community College, and spent 15 years working as a nurse at the hospital.

Like many nurses who enroll in EMU’s RN-to-BSN program, Benson was attracted to a field of nursing that requires a bachelor’s degree – home health, in her case. When she began looking at programs in the region, the Adult Degree Completion Program stood out. One of its biggest attractions was its one-night-a-week schedule, allowing her to fit continuing education around her full-time work at the hospital.

“That was the thing that really tripped it for me,” she said. “I thought I would never get my bachelor’s … I won’t say it was easy, but it just worked for me.”

Benson, who attends West Waynesboro Church of Christ, also said EMU’s commitment to Christian values was important in her decision to pick it over other area schools.

While the writing load and the time commitment of the program were challenging, she said, a highlight of her coursework was an outreach project in which she worked on nutrition and social development with an Hispanic family in Dayton.

“It was a good learning experience going into another culture that I was very uncomfortable with [at first], and doing that project and succeeding at it … I felt like I really accomplished something when I left that family,” she said.

After graduating from EMU in 2005, Benson worked in home health care for five years, before returning to Augusta Health in her current role. When she’s not busy flipping through charts, she’s been encouraging colleagues to look at EMU’s program for advancing their nursing careers.

“You can do this,” she tells them. “There’s a lot of reading, but it’s obtainable.”