Words are powerful things, made even more powerful by the actions and individuals that they are often used to describe.

On Friday, Feb. 27, a first-generation freshman at our University, Jarell Green, delivered testimony to the Senate Finance/Assembly Ways and Means Joint Subcommittee on K-12 Education/Higher Education in Carson City.

Jarell’s words before those who were assembled that day were pure and powerful; they were profoundly moving and memorable.

His personal story, which he shared in the following remarks, reminded me of the introductory pages of Cervantes’ classic work, “Don Quixote.” In the author’s preface, Cervantes writes that, “Poverty may cast a cloud over nobility, but it cannot hide it altogether.”

So it is with a young person such as Jarell, whose capacity to strive and to seek is certainly inspiring. As Cervantes notes, virtue can always shed a “certain light,” and Jarell’s words on Feb. 27 helped to shine a remarkably reflective light on the value of higher education in this state – a light illuminated by pure and powerful words that few of us will ever forget.

Here is the text from Jarell’s testimony:

Testimony by Jarell Green before Senate Finance/Assembly Ways and Means Joint Subcommittee on K-12 Education/Higher Education

Friday, February 27, 2009

Hello my name is Jarell Green and I am a first generation college freshman at the University of Nevada Reno who is majoring in Secondary Education. I stand before you today humbled and opportunistic at the chance to speak on behalf of myself as well as my peers and to hopefully leave a lasting impression on the turn out of the purposed budget plans.

To be honest, statistically speaking, the odds have been completely contradicted with me being here speaking with you today. I am the product of single mother household within one of Reno’s housing projects. As the statistics read generally the child populous within these areas tend to not graduate high school, let alone make it to a university and carry a 3.86 GPA such as myself. I earned this GPA while working 30 hours a week at a local restaurant and moving from relative to relative after my mother’s death from cancer 2 weeks before my freshman year started. The odds have never truly worked in my favor with most of the friends I grew up with having already been incarcerated and my mother being bipolar and addicted to crack cocaine in my childhood.

The only things that have placed me in front of you today are a dream, hope and a strong work ethic. Since Kindergarten teachers have encouraged me as well as other students that you can become anything you would like to be as long as you work hard and ask for help along the way. What happens now that I am in college and have worked as hard as I possibly could to make it this far, when there is no help in sight? I work 30 hours a week so that I am able to eat and have a roof to sleep under. Even with the help of financial aid, if the tuition for school were to be raised, there is no possible way that I could attend college. What sort of message does this convey? That when you work as hard as you can and dream that one day you will be able to change the lives of at-risk youth and show them that life always offers other alternatives as long as you are willing to work for them, that that means nothing if you were not born into a family that is privileged enough to be able to afford to send you to college.

In my opinion that sounds more like Middle Age Europe with there being no option for social change, which in theory is the complete opposite of democracy and America being the land of the pursuit of happiness. The ultimate satisfaction in my life would be for me to be able to earn my bachelors in teaching, work with at-risk youth and show them that I know exactly what they deal with on a day to day basis and that there will be an option for prosperity for themselves and their families if they so willingly choose. That and the fact that I will be able to send my children off to college, would give me the satisfaction in knowing that I was blessed with the opportunity to succeed that was not dictated by tuition.

Before my mother died we had a talk that will stay with me for the rest of my life. See my mother and I never had the best relationship, because I resented her for the situations that she put me in, but I could not deny that her greatest satisfaction was knowing that I made it to college, and that I was going to have a future, and that I was going to positively affect this world. She gave my sister, who is now serving in Iraq, to my grandmother to raise, but she kept me and even though I was in situations such as growing up in a crack house, visiting her in jail, and not having food or even clean clothes, she saw me succeed and grow from nothing to being a young man who is giving his all to show everyone out there that dreams are truly possible.

That conversation was simple: it was an “I’m sorry” and the look in her eyes gave me this insight. I will not ever forget that conversation or how essential things such as UNR’s cultural diversity center and exceptional people such as my high school history teacher were apart of making my dreams possible. I am asking you from the bottom of my heart to not increase tuition or cut programs that aid in a student’s success such as the Cultural Diversity Center. On behalf of me, my peers, and all the kids at Glenn Duncan Elementary school that I have told could be whatever they dream of as long as they dedicate themselves, thank you for considering our request and listening to my story.