Portland Magazine
Alumni
June 1, 2022
Story by Sydney Gannon
WHILE SCRAMBLING TO find toilet paper during the first March of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sarah Mooney ’96 received a call from her program director. He gave her the classic, anxiety-inducing phrase: “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.” The good news was that she won the 2019 Correctional Services Contractor of the Year award for the GED tutoring program she manages. The bad news was that she could no longer go to work. Columbia River Correctional Facility was on lockdown.
Like every teacher in the field of pandemic-era education, the lockdown didn’t mean the teaching would stop, but it would certainly change. Sarah responded by doubling down on her commitment to a student population she views as underserved.
Sarah has been running a GED tutoring program for incarcerated adults for the past four years. The program is run in partnership with Portland Community College. Both the students and the tutors are adults in custody, ranging in age from 19 to mid-60s. She might have 50 to 60 students and 15 to 20 tutors at a time. The state of Oregon requires most incarcerated adults to get their GED if they do not already have a high school diploma.
Some of her students start out resentful of this requirement. “For some, they come in kicking and screaming,” Sarah says. “They think it’s a waste of time.”
But Sarah has yet to see one graduate who was not incredibly proud of themselves by the end of the process. “I think, for a lot of people, it is a sense of accomplishment. It might be the first thing that they have accomplished that is positive,” she says. “I had a student who came in in his late fifties,” she says, “and he was probably at a first-grade reading level, and he had absolutely no self-esteem that he could do this. He had no confidence that he could get his GED. And he graduated.” Sarah attributes the initial reticence of some of her students to a fear of failure. To combat this fear, she encourages them to celebrate small, incremental successes, like passing a little test, to help build their self-confidence.
Students come to class with a range of motivations. Although adults in custody in Oregon who are 65 years of age or older are not required to work toward their GED, Sarah has met many who feel motivated to do so because they have never had the opportunity before. Many have told Sarah that they want to set a good example for their children or grandchildren, “because what am I supposed to say to them when they decide they’re going to drop out of high school?” Some want a college education. Some need the certification to pursue a career in certain trades. One way that Sarah encourages her more skeptical students is by conveying the twists and turns of her own path. She got her undergraduate degree in English, but her passions for food and food justice—she’d worked in soup kitchens and had built housing for migrant farmers on a blueberry farm—inspired her to go to graduate school at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, where she studied ethnobotany and sustainability. In addition to learning about food, she discovered she had a passion for making cheese—who knew?—and she learned about international food policy and efforts to ensure that everyone has fair food accessibility. Sarah even traveled to Bosnia to learn more about their Indigenous food systems and worked with a community of women who survived the Bosnian War by foraging for food.
Making cheese and studying food systems may be wildly different from how Sarah started and what she does now, but for her, it’s an example of self-reinvention. One thing did lead to the next. She’d been teaching classes about cheesemaking and raising chickens, while taking some graduate-level classes in education at Portland State, which led her to Portland Community College and the Columbia River Correctional Facility. It all came down to her passion for teaching and service.
“Listen, I went to college. I got a degree in English, and I became a cheesemaker!” Sarah tells her students, “I reinvented myself. Like, anything is possible. You can literally do anything you want. You just have to figure out the right path to get there.”
Of course, the playing field for reinvention isn’t equitable, and she recognizes this in terms of her students’ lived experiences. Sarah tends to see her students as survivors. “They’ve survived for a long time without an education, but also without the opportunity to do something else.” She sees her program as a tool toward new options.
One of her current students, who is in his 60s, came to her one day in tears. He held a book in his hands. He told Sarah, “This is the first book I’ve ever read in my life.” He came in about a week later, saying he’d be done with book two over the weekend and asked if he could check out book number three in the series beforehand, to which Sarah responded, “Oh my God, yes!”
Before the pandemic hit, Sarah would hold a final celebration for her students who completed their GEDs in the form of a graduation ceremony with caps, gowns, tassels, cake, the works. They would have speakers and invite the graduates’ friends and families to the ceremony to take part in the celebration. “It was as authentic to a graduation as we could make,” she says. “Those little things that make it so, so valuable.”
Then the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, and Sarah’s work life was changed completely. The Columbia River Correctional Facility was locked down, and Sarah was told that she would have to stay home for a month. She wasn’t allowed back into the facility until June of 2020, and then was kicked out several more times due to new variants. The pandemic has been uniquely difficult for adults in custody in Oregon. After many months of uncertainty, Sarah was finally able to see her students in March of 2022.
The pandemic also posed a major challenge to Sarah’s communication with her students. While schools all over the world had moved to a majority online format, meeting via Zoom calls, Sarah’s students do not have access to the internet. She could not call or text them.
So, how did Sarah keep teaching? She went old school. Her students got packets. All her students were given a calculator, a notebook, and packets that contained their lessons. They would fill out forms telling her their academic needs. Sarah would receive these packets every week, grade them, and then send them back with new packets. That has been her main source of communication with her students off-and-on for the past two years.
Because the Columbia River Correctional Facility is a release facility, Sarah lost over half of her students and most of her tutors to release during the pandemic. Now that she is able to see her students again, Sarah is starting over with new students and tutors. “There’s a lot of resilience because the ones that really want it are going to keep going,” she says. “It’s incredible to watch.”
She is currently working on breaking down barriers for adults in custody who, after finishing their GEDs, want to continue to a college education by getting the Pell Grant. “We’re just trying to create a really cohesive process for our students to just get folded into the community at PCC.”
SYDNEY GANNON ’24 is Portland magazine’s editorial intern.
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