Leslie Cornelious-Weldon picked up the phone in the middle of her workday. She was multitasking, she explained — because that's how the job goes. After twenty-six years at Shawnee Community College, she knows how to run a conversation and a center at the same time.

She is the Alexander County Center coordinator at Shawnee — a title she describes accurately as a director position with a coordinator label. She handles academic scheduling, student support, and the dozens of invisible things that keep a satellite educational center functioning for first-generation students who often arrive without a roadmap.

She also graduated from Meridian in 1989.

"This is a super school district," she might say — except those are Larry Houston's words, not hers. What Leslie says is more personal: "This is where I graduated from. This is where my kids graduated from. You can't let the naysayers get us down."

After Meridian, she attended Shawnee herself — a Bobcat and a Saint — before transferring to Southern Illinois University Carbondale to study social work. She had started thinking about nursing because she knew she wanted to help people. Then she thought more carefully about blood and trauma. Social work, she decided, offered the same purpose without the body fluids.

"All my life," she said when asked how long she'd been oriented toward helping people.

That instinct now plays out in the work she does every day. "So many parents have not attended college," she said. "A lot of first-generation students need a start. And mom and dad don't know how to help them." Smaller rural schools often lack full-time guidance counselors, which means students arrive at Shawnee genuinely uncertain how any of this works — financial aid, transfer pathways, academic expectations, what questions to even ask.

Leslie helps them figure it out. She also declines to let them use difficulty as a permanent excuse.

When students come to her with struggling grades and complaints about instructors, she redirects. "How much work are you putting in? Are you using your resources? Are you going to tutoring?" She helps them problem-solve. She does not let them off the hook.

"If you don't put the work in," she said, "you don't get anything out."

What she sees in Meridian students specifically — and it shows up in how she talks about them — is a particular quality of resilience. Students who came through difficult circumstances, students others counted out, students who kept going anyway.

She points to one student by name: AJ Leonard. The interviewer recognized him — the basketball player who navigated the McKinney-Vento program, which supports students experiencing homelessness. "When everybody counted him out, he still stuck with it," she said.

"They're not making excuses," she said. "It's not somebody else's fault. They're just grinding it out and getting it done."

That's the Meridian quality she keeps encountering, and it makes her proud in a way that feels specifically personal — not institutional.

Her own son grew up in this district, graduated from Meridian while simultaneously earning college credit through the Fast Start dual-enrollment partnership with Shawnee. He took a few years off after that, worked, found his footing, and recently completed his master's degree in human resources from SIUE. He's 29.

"It is very gratifying," she said.

She offers the Fast Start program as evidence for something she believes deeply: that the tools exist to help these students succeed, if they use them. The program gave her son a head start that he eventually caught back up to on his own timeline.

At the end of this year, Leslie plans to retire.

Twenty-six years at Shawnee. Thirty-some years of working with students from the region that shaped her. She'll find something to do — she said as much without hesitation.

But the advice she has carried into every hallway, every tough conversation, and every student who thought the door was closed will outlast the job title.

"Dream big and work hard," she tells them. "Grind now. You will shine later."

If you do the work.