Adult Education Instructor Andrew Wiley sets up his temporary classroom in an unlikely place.
The concrete block wall room is nine feet by twenty-one feet. It is windowless and has a metal conference table and several plastic chairs.
Wiley sets up two laptops on the table along with a plastic bin full of files.
Welcome to GED instruction inside the Pulaski County Detention Center (PCDC) in Somerset.
Men and women crowd the jail which has beds for 171 but is over capacity PCDC Jailer Anthony McCollum says with about 350 inmates. Among them is 32-year-old Kelsey Tasker, a mother of four children, who’s sentenced to six years for a variety of drug offenses.
“I was nine years old when I first tried marijuana and I smoked marijuana until the day that I was incarcerated, really, but I was introduced to meth when I was, I want to say I was 21 and I had been hooked on it ever since.”
Tasker says the pod she lives in at the jail holds thirty women. She says those who don’t have a bunk bed, like her, sleep on a thin mat.
“It's chaos behind the locked door, really, and it's just a lot of loudness.”
It’s not an ideal place to study for a GED but that’s exactly what Tasker did this past year.
From 2020 to 2024, she was one of 4,460 inmates in Kentucky jails and prisons who earned their GED through the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS). Ryan Quarles, President of KCTCS says the GED program gives inmates hope and a path to a new life once they’re released.
“As Kentuckians exit the criminal justice system, it's in our society's best interest they learn a skill or get a degree, because they're more likely to not return to jail or prison if they have a skill which leads to a job.” PCDC Jailer McCollum agrees.
“What we wanted to do whenever I took office is to have people ready once they are released from custody, to have people to go out and be able to be reentered into society. A lot of them in here didn't have their high school diplomas. And so, getting jobs or even getting into college, a high school diploma was one thing that they had to have.”
Wiley says he has about thirty inmates right now working on their GED at the Pulaski County Detention Center.
“I don't see them as whatever they did to get them in here. I see them as somebody that wants to get out of here and do something else. Because I've had them before asking like, aren't you afraid to come in here with some of these people? No, because to me, they're just a person trying to learn something and do something to better themselves.”
Wiley meets with the GED students one at a time for a couple of hours a week. Tasker says it’s a nice break from the chaos in her pod.
“It was nice to get that break. It really was in that, you know, the calmness of the outside of the room, because it can, it can get pretty hectic in there, you know, trapped up in one room with all these females and, you know, some of them are long-timers, and some of them, you know, just for a couple days. But you know, we have to make the best out of it regardless.”
Tasker used a tablet to study packets of schoolwork that Wiley gave her on the four main subjects: math, social studies, language arts, and science. Tasker says she studies in the pod in the morning.
“I would get up in the mornings and I would drink all my coffee and watch the news while everybody else would go back to sleep after breakfast. And that way the tables were open and, you know, it was nice and quiet, and because once lunch is served, there's really no reading or anything like that going on in there.”
Tasker finished her GED in a couple of months and had her picture taken in a graduation gown with her diploma.
“Oh, it was a major accomplishment. It really was. I haven't been in school in 16 years, and that's a long time, and my kids were ecstatic to hear that I had actually completed it.”
She wants to have a career someday to support her family.
“It gives me an opening to expand my future for, you know, when I get out, and that makes me think of, what kind of careers that I want to have, and you know how I want to switch my life around and for the better, not only for me, but for my children as well.”
Cindy McGaha, Director of Adult Education for Somerset Community College, says, “it gives them a chance to change their lives. They can be a better example for their kids. They have better opportunities once they get out for jobs or to go on to school. It helps their self-esteem. They are able to feel a little bit better about what they've accomplished and know that they can do things when they set their mind to it.”
The joy on Tasker’s face in her graduation photo tells it all. The GED program is free to the inmates.
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