Paine College ushered in the semester by celebrating its 140th year on Friday morning. At the HEAL Complex on campus, the 2022 Fall Convocation honored current and incoming students along with alumni in a ceremony arranged to encourage and uplift its student body.
“The opening convocation marks of the official beginning of the new semester, even though we have been in classes since Aug. 1,” said Paine College president Cheryl Evans Jones, who was the keynote speaker for the assembly. “I hope the students will embrace the tradition and the spirit of the event, that they will feel the energy and enthusiasm from that and go forth throughout this semester, in their entire academic career at Paine College so that they can follow their roadmap to success, which is graduation.”
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Several invocations preceded Jones, including those from the Rev. Luther Felder who is the campus pastor, the Rev. Macie King, a United Methodist pastor, and Christian Methodist Episcopal Bishop Thomas Burns Sr.
Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. was among the opening speakers, touting the resiliency of the school and encouraging entering freshmen to build relationships in and out of the classroom to complement the benefits of their education.
“There’s a world out there waiting on you, and you have a responsibility to make broad relationships,” Davis said. “Not just with your classmates, but with this community, to make a mark in your generation that will never be erased.”
In her address, Jones praised the college’s recent accomplishments, including new hybrid smart classrooms, funded by grants from the city and from Bank of America; the arrival of a Women’s Golf Team, and the accreditation of the school’s Department of Business Administration by the Association of College Business Schools and Programs. Jones also offered wisdom to pupils, emphasizing fiscal and academic responsibility, saying “C’s do not earn degrees.”
A special surprise was arranged for the students after the president’s speech, in which J.R. Henderson of Paine’s Board of Trustees presented the heads of Atlanta-based internet service provider Moolah Wireless, who gave away free tablets with one year of free connectivity for students who had received Pell grants.
Henderson alluded to media reports that rapper T.I. had distributed tablets to 200 college students in the Atlanta area.
“We picked up the phone and said, ‘Atlanta has T.I.; we have CeeLo’,” Henderson said. “We want to do exactly what we saw another college do, so he connected us with Moolah Wireless.”
While Grammy-winning hip-hop artist and Paine’s artist-in-residence CeeLo Green was not in attendance, he did offer a recorded video stream in which he congratulated Paine students, expressed gratitude for being a part of Moolah’s initiative and praised the company’s generosity.
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Moolah Wireless CEO Vernell Woods made sure to tell the students that the company is currently in the process of arranging for the distribution of free devices—whether tablets or laptops–to those who were not awarded Pell grants and are therefore ineligible for the free tablets, barring the completion of a similar connectivity deal.
“We wanted to create a software that put money back into the community, so we built the software ourselves,” said Moolah Wireless CEO Vernell Woods. He went on to note that the company launched the software for about eight years. “Our only goal was to close the digital divide close. We’re trying to make sure that people that look like us, people in the community that are left out, don’t get left out.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
