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E L E M E N TARY S C H O O L P R I N C I PAL
PASSING IT ON Why did Nicole Peña-Goodman’s ’95 high school guidance counselor in Davenport keep encouraging her to consider a college she had never heard of? “He was always cheering for Simpson and thought it would be a good fit for me,” she says. He wasn’t the only one. Shelley Scott O’Meara, Simpson’s softball and volleyball coach at the time, seemed to make it her personal mission to recruit Peña-Goodman. “She came to some of my games,” she says. “It made me feel pretty important. She got me on campus for a visit. She made it happen.”
college. The transition from an urban setting to a rural school was “a huge shock for me.” “I felt like I wasn’t going to be good enough to even get in,” she says. “Things didn’t come easily for me, but I worked hard, and I made sure I did what I needed to do. I’m glad that Simpson looked at me as a whole and not just my test scores.” Simpson
“I want to be for future generations what it was for me.”
Peña-Goodman played softball, volleyball and basketball during her Simpson career. She was inducted into the College’s Hall of Fame in 2005.
It’s not the games she remembers most. It’s the relationships, especially with O’Meara, who passed away in 2008. Peña-Goodman honored her memory with a gift to the new fitness center.
-Nicole Peña-Goodman ’95
Here we could skip forward to the present, in which PeñaGoodman is beginning her 20th year as an educator and her seventh year as principal of the Scuola Vita Nuova (the Italian version of School of New Life) Charter School in Kansas City, Mo. But that would be skipping over the impact Simpson had in getting her there. Peña-Goodman was the first person in her family to attend
“It was a no-brainer,” she says. “She cared about us.” It’s that care that Peña-Goodman tries to pass on to her 207 students. “It’s personal for me,” she says. “When they’re here, my goal is to make them feel that they can accomplish anything and take on the world.” As for Simpson, “It shaped my life. I want Simpson to be for future generations what it was for me.” ■
15 SIMPSON COLLEGE