“What we are seeing in this country is a degradation of the literacy rate that’s resulting in students who can’t learn. Schools are basically failure factories, where kids fail repeatedly until they think they can’t do it anymore and just give up,” she says, citing the 1.2 million high school dropouts every year and the 25 percent of American children who never learn to read in the first place.
In Pinellas County, where Clearwater is located, just 78 percent of high school students graduate.
But since the Learning Center opened its doors in 1998 in a converted home on the edge of North Greenwood, it has focused on reverting that trend with its Applied Scholastics program utilizing the tools and techniques of Study Technology. It has achieved impressive success in raising literacy rates and boosting the educational achievement of students across a broad spectrum of ages, ethnicities and educational backgrounds.
Nickerson joined the Community Learning Center in 2016, when it cut the ribbon on a 7,000-square-foot facility near downtown Clearwater. She delivered an impressive 4,770 tutoring hours in her first year, spurred on by her unshakable certainty that at the root of drug use, crime and immorality lies simply a lack of understanding and an inability to function in society.
“When you take the time to address individual education issues with each child, you can turn things around,” Nickerson says. “Our goal is to bring sanity into education and help children become literate so they can achieve whatever they want in life.”
To date, Nickerson and her team have used Study Technology to bring higher levels of learning and literacy to thousands of students. They have also broadened their services to offer low-cost tutoring in all subjects, free homework help and SAT preparation.
The Learning Center is a dream come true for Nickerson, who says she loved school when she was growing up in Iowa and always planned to teach and pass on her love of learning. “The first thing I ever wanted to be was a teacher,” she recalls.
Today, after nearly a decade involved in transforming the educational landscape in Clearwater, Nickerson says, “the most rewarding part of teaching is watching students grow up, become adults and lead productive lives in their communities.”
Nickerson describes a 12-year-old who arrived to her school certain that he was dumb and planning to drop out. Thanks to Study Technology, he became a confident learner who went on to succeed in high school. “That kid left here, knowing that he could learn and that he could do it and that he wasn’t stupid. To me, that’s priceless.”
Another student hated writing. “His handwriting was horrible. His punctuation was horrible. His capitalization was horrible. His spelling was horrible,” Nickerson says. “But his stories did have a beginning, a middle and an end. So I just acknowledged every bright thing I could possibly find about his writing. And now he actually writes for a living. He is a very good writer and I factually think that is the coolest thing.”
One girl at Nickerson’s school was having trouble both as a student and in life. Jen asked her: “When was the last time a teacher told you that you did a good job?” When the answer was “kindergarten,” Jen says, “I got mad. I told her: ‘Your teachers have failed you.’ And from that minute forward, she and I started working together as a team to handle her education.”
Jen explains that the student went on to graduate and is “now an executive in an amazing group and I couldn’t be more proud. This is what you can do when you give a kid simple tools of education, help them become more literate and help them understand their environment better. They just take off, and they win and succeed in life. And that really is what it’s all about.”
“Fixing a kid’s education is one of the most beautiful things ever,” Jen says. “It never gets old.”
