'It's just too much to take in': Why losing commencement at this Dallas HBCU is a very big deal - The Dallas Morning News

The sorrow in the voice of Paul Quinn College senior Jennifer Fletcher was heavy and resigned: “I’m packing. I’m packing my things to go home.”

The 21-year-old Dallas student and I talked just before she piled her belongings into the car over the weekend and, with sister and fellow Paul Quinn senior Jazzmun Norman, headed home to Memphis -- and an uncertain future.

The coronavirus scare has thrown kids off campuses coast to coast, but nowhere is the abrupt exile more painful and potentially devastating than for Paul Quinn students.

It’s only been days since classes at the historically black college in southeast Oak Cliff moved online and most of the work-study jobs evaporated. Then came word that the school would postpone its May commencement until 2021.

Could it get any worse? Yes, everyone in student housing was told they had to go home.

Jennifer Fletcher, a senior at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, has had to return to her home home because of the coronavirus. During her years at the school, she has participated in volleyball and cheerleading, as well as holding many student leadership roles.(Family photo)

Jennifer, a business management major, ended the awful week feeling overwhelmed, stressed and trying her best to tamp down her anger. “It’s just too much to take in right now,” she said.

Trying to navigate her coursework online from her family’s home, rather than alongside her Paul Quinn classmates, will be a tall order. “I love my family, but I just don’t want to get distracted,” she said.

The deepest cut for Jennifer, who will be the first female college graduate in her family, was the cancellation of commencement ceremonies. She fought through her tears to explain it to me: “I worked three hard years, sacrificing even my summer breaks to stay at Paul Quinn and ensure that I would graduate early.”

“Now my family won’t get an opportunity to see me walk,” she said. “I’m not going to get the moment.”

The school’s president, Michael Sorrell, knows that “moment” Jennifer was referring to -- the joy and heart-felt sense of accomplishment that he’s witnessed again and again since he began resurrecting this school in 2007.

It’s what Paul Quinn college is all about. For many of its students, graduation isn’t just an expected rite of passage but the culmination of a multi-generational struggle.

Sorrell tries to remind Paul Quinn seniors that they still will receive their degrees in May and their transcripts will show they completed their degree requirements on that date. He tells them in phone calls and on social media that “this decision only impacts the ceremony, not the accomplishment.”

But he understands the enormity of the blow.

That’s why Sorrell was fiercely determined not to cancel graduation -- until the current state of coronavirus affairs left him no choice. “I get why they are struggling,” he said. “It all comes back to the trauma that’s permeated many of their lives for so many years.”

Many of us had some measure of instability or grief during our growing-up years, but it’s not such a large load that it defines us. Even now, in what seems to be a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis, we are grounded in a foundation that allows us to know that things are tough right now, but we will prevail.

In contrast, the overwhelming majority of Paul Quinn’s students have grown up in soul-grinding daily poverty, a rocky existence that bred trauma and left them without steadying roots.

The college’s baseline work involves creating an environment where their students are safe, secure and loved, Over time, and for the first time in their lives, the students begin to develop expectations -- and those needs are met.

Then along comes a global pandemic that yanks every fiber of that stability away.

“Now you have to go back to a place where there’s scarcity – not enough food, a bed, other basic resources,” Sorrell told me. “You love your family but you’re reminded again what the preponderance of your life has been.

“That is incredibly traumatic,” he said. “We’ll be dealing with this fallout for years.”

Among the concerns that Sorrell wakes up with each morning are his freshman students, who had only a little more than a semester to figure out the college experience. “Just when you think you’ve settled into some normalcy, you won’t see normal for a long time,” Sorrell said.

Paul Quinn College freshman Andrea Maldonado, 19, works on her college lessons as her sister Paola's dog Koko sits on her lap. Andrea is one of the lucky few who have been able to move in with family rather than relocate after the coronavirus shut down Paul Quinn College's student housing.(Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

Andrea Maldonado is one of the lucky few of the students getting to stay in Dallas. The 19-year-old freshman began her Paul Quinn studies in June; in January, her older sister, Paola, took a job with the college.

Rather than a complicated – and distracting -- relocation back to her mother’s home in Los Angeles, Andrea can temporarily live with Paola.

Andrea told me that her initial excitement over the newness of moving to online learning was short-lived. “First, it was the thought of ‘OK, cool, no more school,’” but then she discovered that laptop lessons and her new home gutted her established schedule.

“It’s still difficult for me to find a routine and stick to it because being off campus gives me a lot more free time than I would like to have,” said Andrea, who is a Paul Quinn College Presidential Scholar and majoring in business administration with a focus on fund-raising and philanthropy.

Andrea’s biggest stress is navigating her job with Lyda Hill Philanthropies, whose Dallas staffers all are working remotely because of health concerns. She is brand-new to the organization and said it feels more difficult to reach out to a colleague for help when she can’t do it in person.

Strict self-quarantining to try to keep the coronavirus from spreading is important to Andrea. She talks with friends in group chats, but she acknowledged that “this entire self-isolation was made for me. I’m very much more of an introvert.”

While the students adapt to e-learning, Sorrell and his team talk every morning and afternoon about what they can do better.

Paul Quinn College president Michael Sorrell played a little basketball with his 9-year-old son, Michael, last week on a basketball court on the Paul Quinn College campus.(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

“Prez,” as most everyone calls Sorrell, also conducts regular chats on social media to keep students, staff and alums in the loop. More important, he tries to provide assurances that “we will get to the other side.”

Sorrell bluntly acknowledges, just as he did when he first took over at Paul Quinn, that,“This is hard and it’s gonna be hard for some time. But at the end we are going to win.”

Even as he dries students’ tears, he’s also trying to figure out what his school looks like when the coronavirus subsides.

His answers turned sermon-like as he told me he wouldn’t wish hard times on anyone, but “what I do wish is that when hard times come, people see them for what they can truly be, which is an opportunity to be transformed.”

It’s too soon to know what that means for Paul Quinn College, but even over the phone, I could sense the wheels turning furiously in Sorrell’s brain.

“There’s no guarantee that schools will go back to business as usual in August,” he said. “We have to prepare ourselves for a very different reality for the next school year.”

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