Student Success Stories: Maggie
03/24/2023
At Tri-County Jobs for Ohio’s Graduates (JOG) we strive to try to help youth actualize their dreams by helping them learn steps on how to get there. Maggie is a special case where she knew exactly what she wanted to do in life, but she needed support to achieve her dream of working with children. When Maggie came to JOG, she told her Career Specialist, Cindy Nort, that she needed help to help her achieve her goals of graduating with her diploma and starting her dream job!
Though she saw where she wanted to end up, Maggie ran into a few hiccups along the way, causing her to move out on her own at 17. When she did, she enrolled in PRIDE Academy. While there, Cindy came in to discuss what the JOG program is and explained the cash incentive program to help students graduate from high school. This extra “monetary push” helped ignite her determination to receive her diploma: she was able to make up 18 months of work in just three months! While she was working with JOG, Cindy helped her find the right place to work to do more in the field she wanted to be in. “I have known that this is what I wanted to do since kindergarten,” Maggie explained. “I had a kindergarten teacher that made me want to be her when I grew up.” She continued, “Though I went through a couple other career ideas, like working with hair, I always came back to wanting to teach.”
Currently, Maggie is a Lead Teacher at Kindercare’s discovery preschool program, which works with kids between 18 months and 3 years old. She helps children learn their ABCs, how to count, to identify colors, and to recognize shapes. She tries to keep her lessons engaging every month by switching up the educational topics. For example, the topic for March is “Amazing Animals.” She is helping the kids embrace learning about different animals through decorating the classroom with different things like vines and paper bird cutouts. At the end of the day, she said, “I just want kids to be able to go home excited to tell their parents what they learned about today at school.” When it came to specific tasks, she elaborated, “One of our recent projects was making chicks from toilet paper rolls, and I had them count how many circles were in their toilet paper roll figures.”
It is truly a gift to be able to help students that know their dream to achieve it, and fantastic Career Specialists at JOG, like Cindy Nort, are able to help make our participants’ dreams a reality.