COVER STORY
An ALPHA Don’t think about Grandma, she told herself.
BY ERIC TOWNSEND
Don’t think about Dr. Long. Or Mr. Means. Or the Alphas. Don’t think about the Elon Academy and everyone who helped to get you here. You won’t get across this stage with dry eyes. Standing among her college classmates in Minges Coliseum on the campus of East Carolina University, Brittney Burnette waited her turn to walk a platform that, statistically speaking, she had no business crossing. Raised by a single mother. Lived for a time with her grandmother. Neither parent attended college, let alone graduated. Money had been so tight that Burnette worked two jobs in high school to help pay mom’s bills. Yet there she waited on a warm May evening, a criminal justice major already preparing for a master’s program in social work, her purple robe and decorated mortarboard a rebuke to national data and a testament to an educational opportunity that seven years earlier had welcomed her to the Elon University campus. She just didn’t want to cry. Not now. The challenge would be to keep from looking up too often to the right of the stage, where her grandmother, uncle and cousin had a perfect view of the hundreds of robed students about to graduate from ECU’s College of Human Ecology. Brittney Burnette had beaten the odds, in no small part because of the Elon Academy. ‘Brittney had to grow up fast’
An only child born in 1991 to parents not yet out of their teens, Burnette spent her elementary school years riding bikes, writing in journals and watching syndicated television reruns of “The Golden Girls” any time her mother, a certified nursing assistant at the time, was at work in a local retirement community. Home life was anything but ideal. Her mother was gone a lot—sometimes at work, sometimes with friends—usually leaving Burnette alone. And when mom was around, rules were lax. Her grandmother, Lena Burnette, took note of the way her daughter was raising her granddaughter. “Brittney had to grow up fast. She was always mature, but her mother was young and still in her partying days,” says the longtime teaching assistant in the Alamance-Burlington School System. “Wherever Brittney was, I’d go and get her and bring her home with me. I didn’t want Brittney around that. I’d keep her out of that environment as much as I could.”
22 the MAGAZINE of ELON