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A celebration for the success of tnAchieves was held Wednesday afternoon at Morristown Landing.

Several members of the community who helped the program grow were present to honor its achievements over the years.

Hamblen County Mayor Bill Brittain welcomed all in celebrating a program that has helped send 10,000 students to Walters State Community College and 1,000 to TCAT Morristown.

“Thank you for celebrating this great milestone tnAchieves has accomplished in the Lakeway Area at TCAT Morristown and Walters State,” Brittain said.

“The timing is very appropriate as TCAT Morristown was named the best TCAT facility in the state and Walters State was named the best community college in the state.”

Brittain mentioned how students throughout the state have benefited from the program.

“I think these students have benefited from the Last Dollar Scholarships offered by tnAchieves but also from the wisdom and dedication from their mentors; hundreds of men and women who have helped students navigate the admission process.”

As the mayor looked back, he reflected on the growth of the program since the counties’ decision to join.

“It’s been more than 10 years since tnAchieves expanded to the Lakeway Area. It has been operating in Hamblen, Hancock, Grainger and Sevier County the longest and it has been amazing to see it spread across the state.

“There have been a lot of lessons learned since then and the most important being that we as a region want our young people to succeed in this journey called life and education and job skill training is important to get a strong start.”

Morristown Mayor Gary Chesney welcomed the group to Morristown Landing and said how important tnAchieves is to the community.

“Welcome to Morristown Landing,” Chesney said. “We have been open for three weeks and we are so proud of this facility.”

“Prior to my time as mayor I had served 20 years on our local school board. I love my job as mayor, but my real passion is education. I know what tnAchieves is, the impact it has on our community and how it greatly helps students in our community. Thank you all and congratulations.”

Former Knox County Mayor and founding tnAchieves Board Member Mike Ragsdale discussed how he was inspired to create KnoxAchieves.

“When I was first elected mayor I went to Nashville to talk about educational issues and I met this guy who was a first generation college student and he told me this story,” Ragsdale said.

“His mother worked at a small bank in West Tennessee and one Friday when she got her paycheck she saw it was more than usual so she went to the Bank President to tell him that the check was wrong. He told her that it’s correct and to use that extra money to help send her son to college. She told him that no one in her family has gone to college and they don’t even know where to start. The president told her to bring her son to the bank next week and he’ll help him fill out paperwork.”

“Well then the boy went to college, got his law degree and became the Senior Advisor to the Governor of Tennessee. It all started because one person was willing to step and help him. One person believed in the power of education and how important it is.”

The story inspired Ragsdale to return to his staff in Knoxville to find out what happens to the students in the county after they graduate.

“I came to our staff and wanted to know what our students were doing after they left high school and what we found was they fell into one of three categories,” Ragsdale said.

“The first being those who had families who were economically blessed and they could send them wherever they wanted, the second being those who excelled in academics and had scholarship offers and then the third, an equally talented group whose parents didn’t go to college or from backgrounds where academics weren’t seen as important and they went into the workforce and found five to ten years later they found that the job they had couldn’t provide for a family and they didn’t have the education to get a better job.”

After receiving the findings, Ragsdale wanted to help the third group get an education to help them have a better future.

“So we wondered how we could help these students and we found that the answer would be free community college.”

“We didn’t just want to give these kids money, we wanted to have people there to help them and guide them along their journey. We put together a plan and format to send Knox County high school graduates to community college for free. The only ingredient we were missing was the money.”

After coming up with the idea to provide students with free community college, Ragsdale received a call from a friend that he believed could help make his plan a reality.

“I got a call from Randy Boyd inviting me to come to his house and have breakfast with him. He had something he wanted to talk to me about,” Ragsdale said.

“When I got there he told me he wanted to make Knoxville and Knox County the most pet friendly area in America and he said that is something that I could do and I told I would love to work on that with him then I told him I had an idea I wanted to run past him about sending students to community college for free.”

After he presented the idea, he could see Boyd’s passion for the program and the two began to get the ball rolling.

“As I was telling him I could see it in his eyes that he got it. This was before he was Senior Advisor to Bill Haslam, before he was Commissioner of Economic Development and long before he was President of UT. After he joined, he raised $2 million in just a couple weeks.”

“Randy then recruited a couple of Knoxville Business Executives, Rich Ray and Tim Williams, and I talked with a good friend of mine who was City Mayor while I was County Mayor and his name is Bill Haslam and along with Krissy we were the original board.”

“We visited with the local community college president, guidance counselors, school principals and soon we had the community colleges and the schools on board and then we were up and running.”

After the success of KnoxAchieves, Ragsdale saw the increase in interest from surrounding counties to join the program.

“Not soon after the success of the program other counties and cities wanted to join in and KnoxAchieves became tnAchieves and over a period of several years leadership just like in this room today helped the program spread to 27 different counties in the state.”

Concluding the program, a five person panel consisting of Dr. Angi Smith, vice president for Student Services at WSCC, Susanne Cox, TCAT Morristown president, John Cagle Jefferson County High School vice principal and two WSCC Students, Cheyanne Sands and Alana Van Valkenburg, held a discussion about the importance of tnAchieves.