More than 700 students age 50 and older benefit from the Academy for Lifelong Learning program that Lone Star College-Montgomery has offered for 15 years.
Steve Gorman, ALL program coordinator at LSC-Montgomery, started going to classes four years ago when he moved to the area. Today, he teaches a film studies class about English film director Alfred Hitchcock.
“They had a movie class that Lone Star professors do during the year, and during the summer people were saying [they would] like to continue doing that,” Gorman said. “It gets [people] out. They socialize and learn about some of Alfred Hitchcock’s techniques.”
The ALL program costs $35 annually for members to gain access to all offered courses. While most students are over the age of 50, there are a few participants who are younger.
“About 75-80 percent [of students] continue every year,” Gorman said. “People find out about it, and they tell their friends.”
Course subjects range from gardening to philosophy. A Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints group teaches genealogy courses, and a speaker with the FBI has come to speak about computer safety. A group also formed specifically for taking day trips from the area.
“What’s nice about this is these are all volunteers,” Gorman said. “These are people who have retired but still want to teach.”
Course instructor Bob Kinnear, a retired engineer, volunteers to teach courses about World War II, a subject he is passionate about.
“[Kinnear] spent a whole summer at Normandy Beach interviewing people, taking pictures, learning exactly what happened, and then he gives a class on it,” Gorman said. “It’s a dynamite course, and the class fills up really fast.”
The idea to bring a program to LSCS to serve older residents was a community effort in the late ‘90s, Gorman said. Now, the ALL program exists on all of the college system’s campuses.
“The role of the community college is to work with not just the 18-21 crowd but the whole span of a person’s life,” he said.
Course lengths can vary from one session that lasts one or two hours to the current events class that meets 16-20 times each semester. Students enrolled in the ALL program receive the same benefits as full-time college students.
An open house for ALL is scheduled from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Aug. 13 in Building B at LSC-Montgomery.
For more information on the program, visit www.lonestar.edu/all-montgomery or call 936-273-7446.
