Education Is Kin-tagious

ORANGE â€”  At 23, Vicci Sessums fit right in with the crowd talking over schoolwork and gossiping at the campus commons.

Lu Kaaria, 42, a working mother, had little time for that. This is a woman who once somehow managed to tend to the needs of a bunch of 9-year-olds at her son Tim’s birthday party while stealing some moments to catch up on reading for a statistics class. “You know, you have got to study whenever you find the moment,� she explained.

Sessums, an accounting major, is graduating Sundayfrom Chapman University.

So is Kaaria, a sociology and psychology major--who happens to be Sessums’ mother.

Same school. Same class. Same family. Same Fullerton kitchen table that doubled as homework central. But a collision of the worlds of the traditional and nontraditional student.

Still, when they march down the aisle among a graduating class of 645, and now-11-year-old Tim, wearing a mortarboard with two tassels, claps and hollers for mom and sis, Sessums and Kaaria will celebrate the realization of a common goal.

Chapman officials say a parent and child graduating at the same time is a rare occurrence. The pair didn’t even realize this was going to happen until early this semester when they realized they both were on track toward fulfilling their degree requirements.

But no matter. There will be plenty of pomp for this circumstance.

“I told her to go to college and I told her this her whole life because I didn’t really believe I was going to get to,� Kaaria said. “It never occurred to me we would do it at the same time.�

But the path was laid six years ago after Kaaria faced divorce and the prospect of raising her three children on her own. She knew times would be tough if she stuck with the clerical jobs she had, and figured getting a college education would fulfill a desire to move beyond high school learning and put her in better stead for a higher-paying job.

Fine in theory. Nerve-racking in practice.

She threw up repeatedly from anxiety just hours before she took the first step toward her degree by enrolling in a community college class.

“I didn’t know if after having been out of school for so long I would remember how to go to school, how to learn,� Kaaria said.

But once there, “I understood what the man was saying and I thought ‘OK, I’ll be OK.’ �

Kaaria completed her lower-level courses at Harbor College and Cal State Dominguez Hills, holding down clerical jobs at the same time and raising her children. (Another daughter, Deanna, is to graduate today from San Jose State University.)

After landing a secretary job at Chapman University 3 1/2 years ago, she took advantage of a tuition waiver for employees and their children and decided on sociology and psychology, with a minor in anthropology.

After Kaaria began working and studying at Chapman, Sessums decided to return to the classroom too.

She had completed a semester at Dominguez Hills, but after a tuition grant fell through, she took a job working as a clerk at a Wal-Mart in Fontana.

“I was hesitating to go back, to give up my independence. It was a real big struggle,� she said.

But with the tuition break at Chapman and its small class sizes and intimate campus, Sessums opted to return--taking up accounting, a favorite subjects from high school. “I like the logic behind it,� she said.

She is weighing a few accounting job offers and contemplating becoming a CPA after graduation.

Students teasingly called her a “Chapman brat� because of her mother’s working and going to school there.

Meanwhile, her mother was approaching her own studies with a zest that earned her recognition as the top student in the sociology department.

“There’s a lot of times I sit in class and grin like I don’t have good sense because I’m just so glad to be there,� Kaaria said. “I’m so glad to be hearing new ideas.�