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Tammy Zimmer knows what it means to have the deck stacked against you. Her mother had her and her twin sister at 16 and her father didn’t finish high school. Poverty wasn’t a circumstance in her childhood; it was the landscape.

“To grow up in that kind of environment is already a black mark,” Zimmer said. “I came to understand, from a very young age, that not everybody gets the same fair shake. There are just so many different barriers in front of people as it pertains to education.”

Zimmer became a straight-A student anyway. Marching band. Theater. Student council. National Honor Society. She graduated, enrolled in college, and ran straight into what no one had told her: college is not high school.

“It was always at the forefront of my mind that there are barriers which needed to be broken down,” she explained. “I didn’t really know what college was like or what it entailed because I didn’t have the social capital others had. I showed up and didn’t even know about buying your own books and I didn’t have a laptop because my parents hadn’t gone to college and didn’t know how to prepare me for it.”

In her early 20s, Zimmer was involved in a serious car accident that led to felony charges, later pleaded down to misdemeanors. She ended up serving time in jail.

“I’ve been in shackles. I’ve been arraigned. I’ve been in stripes,” Zimmer said. “It was a very, very small taste but it was hard. I think people believe only a certain kind of person goes to prison, and I’m like no. An accident, an addiction – all kinds of different things could land you there.”

She kept going and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Miami University in Ohio. In 2017, she joined Southeast Community College as an English instructor on the Beatrice Campus, commuting between Lincoln and Beatrice every day.

The Nebraska State Penitentiary sat on her route. She would drive past it and wonder why SCC didn’t teach on the other side of the wall.

Nine years later, she is the Administrative Director of UPWARD. When she talks about the work, she steers away from recidivism statistics and toward the personal stories, the kind that carry the same shape as hers.

“We always talk about how transformative education is for the student,” she says. “What’s often underdeveloped is how teaching in this environment transforms those of us who serve it. Some of these students have transformed me as much, perhaps more, than I have transformed anything for them.”

Jennifer Snyder
Communications Specialist
402-323-3393
jsnyder@southeast.edu