THE
wave
EDUCATION
THE ASSOCIATE DEAN’S LIST Irvin Clark has ambitious goals in mind for FSU PC by STEVE BORNHOFT
W
hen Irvin Clark played football for Greensboro High School, Coach Robert Jackson dressed 16 players for games. Clark was among the team’s many twoway players. “First time I left the field, the game was over,” he said. Thirty-seven years later, Clark is still that guy who never takes a play off. As the associate dean for student and strategic initiatives at the Panama City campus of Florida State University, Clark touches anything related to the welfare of students, from admission to academic advising and financial aid to student government. He chaired the panel that developed the campus’s current strategic plan. He is part of campus dean Randy Hanna’s diversity task force. He is responsible for FSU PC’s web pages, social media and marketing efforts. Off campus, he travels a 10-county area from Santa Rosa to Gadsden, forging relationships with school superintendents and other local government officials, community organizations, even the state Department of Corrections. In some of those counties, only about 10 percent of high school graduates move on to post-secondary programs. “If you don’t expose students in, say, Washington and Gadsden counties to a college environment while they are in elementary school, you may be too late,” Clark said. Worst case, they may wind up incarcerated. Ah, but Clark is there, too.
30
June-July 2021
EMERALDCOASTMAGA ZINE.COM
“I was in prison for four hours,” he said of a trip he made to the Northwest Florida Reception Center in Greenhead, near Chipley. “I spoke to 168 inmates who were due to be released in 24 months or less. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re talking about establishing a prisonto-college program that would award certificates in entrepreneurship.” Clark was in the third grade when his teacher sent a permission slip home with him for his parents’ signature. Planned was a field trip to Tallahassee, in the
course of which students were introduced, even if briefly, to FSU, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Community College and what was then known as the Tallahassee Junior Museum. That experience stuck with Clark. “The college scene was inviting to me and exciting,” he recalls. Clark, however, would not enroll in college directly after high school, choosing instead to enlist in the U.S. Navy. His grandfather grew tobacco and vegetables, and summers were brutal. The military was photography by MIKE FENDER
