GLENDALE : College Center Gives Adults A New Chance

If it weren’t for support from Glendale Community College’s Adult Re-Entry Center, Audrey Harris, the certified counselor, would probably have remained Audrey Harris, the office secretary.

Dawna Dayton, the registered nurse, would still have been Dawna Dayton, the single mother on welfare.

Their stories are similar to the more than 800 returning college adults the re-entry center has served since it opened 25 years ago. Administrators held an anniversary celebration for the program earlier this month.

The program was set up to encourage housewives to go back to school. At first the center, then called New Horizons, invited college administrators to speak to participants about course offerings and university programs.

In the early 1970s, the group expanded its services, providing career testing, guidance counseling and college orientation classes. By 1977, college officials expanded the program to include men and changed the name to the Adult Re-Entry Center, said Patricia Leinhard, the group’s first coordinator. Scholarships also became available to students enrolled in the center.

“We’ve had lawyers come out of it, teachers come out of it,” she said. Without scholarships, “people would not have been able to continue with their education.”

That was especially true in Dawna Dayton’s case.

The 27-year-old Glendale woman was the mother of boys aged 3 months and 2 years in 1990 when she decided to go back to college and obtain a nursing degree. Two years later, she sought financial aid from the re-entry center, which offered her $1,500 in scholarships. Dayton graduated from Glendale Community College in 1993.

“They gave me a lot of support as a single mom, a lot of understanding,” said Dayton, who has since remarried and now works at a Century City hospital. “I wouldn’t have made it through school without the money.”

In the case of Audrey Harris of Burbank, she went back to the college in 1981 after completing a high school diploma equivalency program there 23 years earlier. She’s now a counselor at the Glendale campus.

Without the re-entry program, “I would have been out there struggling all by myself,” Harris said. “I could have gotten discouraged. It was instrumental in helping me continue.”