(NDG Wire) Two old computers sit atop aging desks in front of a long green chalkboard in a sparsely decorated room at Justin Kimball High School in Oak Cliff. The words, “Welcome to GO Center” are scrawled on the chalkboard around a red Kimball Knights pennant taped in the middle.
A Kimball students sits at one of the computers, struggling to enter personal information on a scholarship application Web site. Standing over her shoulder is University of North Texas at Dallas master’s student Viola McGowan, ready to encourage and help her navigate through the tedious document.
A first-year counseling student, McGowan serves five hours a day, four days a week as a UNT Dallas “Jaguar Leader” at the high school. Dressed in a white UNT Dallas T-shirt and sporting her trademark smile, McGowan is doing what she loves.
“I love being a mentor. If this is all that I could do, I would do it day in and day out because I love helping people. It gets me one step closer to my goal which is to help kids better themselves,” McGowan said.
She enjoys Kimball because it is an interesting place that doesn’t present a lot of surprises. She goes in with no expectations. “I just take it one day at a time. Whatever curve ball they throw at me, I didn’t expect it anyway, so I swing whether I miss or hit a grand slam.”
As a Jaguar Leader, McGowan helps students look for and apply to colleges, she explains the financial aid process, she helps them find and secure scholarships and she proofreads their scholarship essays. “Anything in terms of applying to college I help them with.” She brought the entire senior class—276 students—to UNT Dallas in January. “That was a hectic day.”
Kimball senior Esther Gibson called McGowan a good person who pushes her to succeed. “She gives me good advice: keep my head up and keep pushing. She takes me to this Web site where you go and apply for scholarships, and she sits down with me and tells me how to go through it. I look up to her. She inspires me a lot.”
Takesha Winn is an English teacher and Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) coordinator at Kimball. She calls McGowan and the GO Center assets to the school.
“She’s doing an awesome job here. It’s helpful because she’s helping students apply for the ACT and SAT. Some students just cannot navigate that process. She helps them with essay writing. It’s an asset to the school because teachers may not always be able to have the extra time to sit down with students to do those things whereas she can. She’s always very helpful.”
Winn said every Dallas Independent School District high school should have a GO Center and maybe even starting as young as middle school so they can start getting exposure to college.
As Kimball students get acceptance letters, the school posts them on bulletin boards around campus. Some of them will become the first in their families to get a college degree, just as McGowan was.
The self-described “small-town girl who had big dreams and wouldn’t stop until they were reached” grew up in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom trailer with her parents and two brothers in Jayess, Miss., 45 minutes west of Hattiesburg. Her parents went to work after graduating from high school—her father as a truck driver, her mother as a textile worker making parachutes for the government.
“Our rooms were tiny, but we made the most of it,” McGowan remembered. “You have to learn to make the most of what you have and love it and treat it like it’s a castle.”
Growing up with two older brothers, she tried to follow in their footsteps. Everything they did, she was going to do. “I was a tomboy,” she said. She played basketball and softball and ran track. Sports taught her time management and, most importantly, “when things aren’t going your way, don’t give up; just try it a different way.”
Her middle school only had five black students in it, so she always had to prove herself. One day her principal told her, “Don’t get mad, get even.” “And that stuck with me. Do it better. Be great. I think the biggest revenge that you can have is success.”
McGowan had a few teachers that didn’t expect anything of her, and when she needed help they wouldn’t offer it, she said, so she had to learn to rely on herself. At Kimball High School she tells students they’re not always going to have somebody they can depend on, “and in those times you need to be able to use your brain to get you where you need to be.”
In high school, she didn’t have anyone to help her with applying to colleges or financial aid. “So for me to be able to help them in a way that I wasn’t able to receive help means a lot to me because I know how hard it is to find your way by yourself.”
Since taking an interest assessment during a career discovery class in sixth grade, she wanted to be a psychologist, she said. During her senior year at Alcorn State University, she did her senior internship at a juvenile detention center, and something about that environment spoke to her.
“It was like, these kids wouldn’t be here if someone had shown them the way. I used to be a troubled child and my guidance counselor helped me find my way. I made it all the way to Texas to a master’s degree program. If she could help me change my life, I can help someone else change theirs for the better.”
McGowan earned a bachelor’s in psychology and then started looking for a counseling program to earn a master’s degree. She looked for an out-of-state school that was affordable, and friends told her about UNT Dallas. She enrolled and said she’s glad she did “because I love the close-knit environment of the school.
“I appreciate the fact that my professors know my name; not only do they know my name, they know the name that I prefer to be called—Liz, because my full name is Viola Elizabeth. I never liked Viola, so I always went by Liz. And the fact that they know what my life goals are, what I want to be in life, where I’m going and where I came from, I appreciate that.”
McGowan’s other brother—whom she called her best friend—died at age 22 during her freshman year at Alcorn State University. He had hypertension and epilepsy. “When everyone else was gone I would see him crying. He was a big guy—he played football. To see this big guy crying like a baby because his headaches were that bad hurt more than me losing him because I know that he’s not in pain anymore.”
“I know what type of person he expected me to be so I try to live up to that. He expected me to give my best attempt even if I didn’t believe that I would succeed, at least try and try hard.”
Now her brother’s death impacts her mentoring because you never know what kids are going through, she said. “You can’t put yourself in their position; all you can do is treat them like individuals and always have a smile on your face because that might be the only smile they will see that day.”
McGowan recently started working a second job at the YMCA in White Rock. After moving to Dallas last fall she played semi-pro basketball with the Dallas Diesel, a Christian traveling club, but two jobs got to be too much so she gave up basketball.
Lilian Rosales, McGowan’s supervisor in the UNT Dallas Office of College Readiness and Academic Success, said McGowan is “dynamic, easy going, compassionate, fun, smart, dependable, and I could go on. She is a true Jaguar Leader.”
The Citi Foundation gave UNT Dallas $35,000 to fund the leadership program which pays for McGowan and three other Jaguar Leader to go into area high schools. The university is looking for two more Jaguar Leaders and at least five more G-Force Mentors to staff the GO Centers.
