Cornelius ‘Dreamers’ get their diplomas

Long road - Ten years after they signed on with a mentorship program to help them through school, most members of IHAD Class Six get their sheepskins

By Alana Kansaku-sarmiento

The Forest Grove News-Times, Jun 4, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Alison Gene Smith / News-Times

Adeline Roman was one of 89 original members of the IHAD Class Six from Cornelius Elementary School. She received her high school diploma during a ceremony last Friday.

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The University Center on Pacific University’s campus was packed with students, families, friends and mentors last Friday night. They watched as a smiling man in a suit and necktie was announced and approached the stage.

“I was watching the ‘Today’ show recently, and they were talking about a family with quintuplets that were all going off to college. The parents were wondering what they were going to do. I turned to my wife and asked, ‘What are WE going to do?’ We have 89 kids!”

So began Ralph Brown – school board member, former educator and I Have a Dream sponsor – as he addressed the audience at the IHAD graduation ceremony.

That is, of course, after he had emcee Patrick Jordan, who, along with Nikki Perry, coordinates the IHAD program, stall for a minute or two while he searched for his missing “I Am a Dreamer” shirt from 1999. That was the year that he and eight other people adopted an entire class of third graders from Cornelius Elementary School. That class is now the graduating Class of 2008.

Brown and his wife Carol are just two sponsors involved with the I Have a Dream program in Forest Grove, which follows a group of low-income children for 10 years, mentoring them, tutoring them, directing them and watching them succeed. This particular class – Class Six – the sixth graduating class from the Oregon chapter, but the first from Forest Grove – had seven sponsors who invested their time and money in the students for an entire decade.

They are Ralph and Carol Brown, Marcia Kahn and Howard Rosenbaum, George and Ruth Burlingham and Molly Saunders.

Speaking to the parents of this year’s Dreamers, Brown acknowledged that, when it was first introduced, the concept of the IHAD program sounded almost too good to be true.

“I remember when we invited you to the school, but didn’t really tell you why,” Brown said. “Then we told you that we were going to put your children in a 10-year program where we would mentor them and tutor them, and then at the end of it all we were going to give them a scholarship.

“Some of you didn’t believe it, but it’s gonna happen, folks.”

Roger Moore, a former Cornelius Elementary School principal, said Forest Grove’s program was “the first rural program for the Dreamer organization in the entire United States.”

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