This leap year, Amarillo College is celebrating its purposeful values: Family, Fun, Innovation, Wow and Yes through a special series we're calling by Leaps and Bounds.

What’s a mother to do when circumstances whisk her to a new home on a foreign shore, a pair of young daughters in tow and a skillset wholly evolved from parenthood, with aptitude aplenty but no grasp of the language of the land?

Zahra Nourmohtad, an Iranian immigrant, knows just what she would do if once again she found herself in the same predicament – as a newcomer to Amarillo. She would retrace the steps that guided her to Amarillo College.
    
AC is where Zahra not only overcame the language barrier, but found employment, enrolled in classes, some even with her daughters, and where associate degrees all of a sudden loom large for all three, crucial stepping stones to the baccalaureate degrees they each will seek.

Zahra was not initially in search of a traditional higher education at AC. It was English as a Second Language (ESL) classes that drew her in, that ultimately made all the difference in her world.

“Amarillo College I absolutely love. It has been a great blessing for me and for my family,” Zarah, a member of AC’s daytime custodial team, said. “I knew zero English when I came here in 2005, but the people at AC helped me, pushed me.

“It wasn’t easy and I struggled. I’m so thankful they never gave up on me.”

Zarah was motivated at the outset by the reality that better language skills would lead to a better employment. She then was a night custodian at an Amarillo school and therefore spent too little time with her school-age daughters. Then in about 2012, two things happened: she was offered a much-desired daytime position with AC, and she made an A in her ESL grammar class.

“I all of a sudden thought ‘wow, I’m going to continue to take more classes,’” she said. “I wanted to set an example for my daughters – that if I can do it, so can they – and now they are going to graduate from AC and so am I. I’m even sure now that I can become a teacher.”

Zarah, an education major, expects to graduate from AC next winter and transfer her credits to West Texas A&M. Her youngest daughter, Shima, will graduate from high school in May, but she has taken so many dual credit classes through AC that she is on track to complete the requirements for an associate degree by the end of next fall.

If all goes according to plan, Shima, who hopes to move on to the study of law, and her mother, the aspiring teacher, will cross the stage in unison at AC’s Commencement in December.

Zarah’s eldest, meanwhile, will beat them both out of the gates. Narmin, a biology major, will graduate from AC this May and has been accepted to attend Texas Tech next fall. Zarah has taken two history classes at AC, one with each of her girls – because she could.

“I’m so proud of my girls,” Zahra said, “and I’m a little bit proud of me too. No one in my family has ever attended college of any kind.”
 
Learning English was not a major roadblock for Zahra’s daughters; they were young enough in 2005 that they might have been hard-pressed to resist the assimilation of Amarillo schools. But for Zarah it was a major challenge, so she enrolled in ESL.

Though she is bilingual – Persian and Turkish – conquering English was an uphill struggle from the get-go. It was not something she accomplished overnight.

“Zahra is a very determined woman,” recalls Karie Eagleston, ESL lab supervisor at AC. “She overcame many obstacles, working full time and raising children. We are very pleased by her success.”

The ESL Program serves students from 35 countries. Some entering the AC program are illiterate in their own countries of origin, while others may speak several languages and even possess degrees. Their circumstances indeed vary, but learning to read and write English is doable for any among the truly motivated, and Zahra was nothing if not that.

“Zahra’s level of achievement is what we want for each of our students,” Eagleston said. “It’s what we hope for everyone who walks through our door. Once she learned how to navigate a syllabus and Blackboard (AC’s online learning-management system), her confidence and expectations just soared.”

Having made the decision to become fully immersed at AC and seek a degree, Zahra had to devise an academic schedule that would not conflict with her job. It was a problem simplified by the flexibility of her boss, Jim Baca, custodial superintendent for AC. He fashioned an individualized work schedule for Zahra that fit her needs, just as he has for others in his charge.

“I try to do whatever I can to help the people on our staff, to encourage them to do what’s best for them and their families, to help them have better futures,” Baca said.

“We work at a College where student success is our top priority, so working with our employees to reasonably accommodate their ability to attend classes is the least we can do, and we’re happy to do it when we can.”

March 7, 2016