LINDSEY SPEAR ~
Flagstaff Resident, Mother & Facility Security Officer
Lindsey Spear’s life is probably crazier than yours.
A mother of three, involved community volunteer, former nurse, full time Facility Security Officer and caretaker to two high-energy goldendoodles, Spear has done it all since moving to Flagstaff from Phoenix in 2006. Her experiences with higher education have affected her throughout her life, largely as a result of the unconventional hurdles she has been overcoming since leaving high school.
Spear’s journey to Flagstaff isn’t as cut-and-dry as relocating for a job or enrolling at NAU. Even before she graduated high school, Spear took community college classes through Paradise Valley Community College in ceramics, English and algebra. However, once she graduated, she did not pursue higher education immediately. She took a year off, and in 2003 she gave birth to her first child. Then, she started college at University of Arizona and Maricopa Community College.
Against her true calling, Spear said her family insisted she pursue a broad-reaching career, such as a business degree.
“My passion has always been in medicine, specifically in athletic training and physical therapy, but I was told very early that math would be too hard, and that I shouldn’t approach that,” Spear said. “So we landed on a business degree.”
However, her time at UArizona was short lived, and she moved up to Flagstaff after a year of classes. While attending NAU, she found a job working for the Department of Planning and Development in the Construction Project Management Division. This job on campus helped pay for her education and raising her son.
Then, between April and August of 2009, Spear had a decade’s worth of life events packed into less than six months: In late April, due to budget cuts, Spear was let go while seven months pregnant. She married her baby’s father in June and gave birth in early August.
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Now, Spear was married with two children and freshly unemployed. Without the funds from her job, she was forced to drop out of school and focus on finding a new position, making ends meet and raising her children.
“It just couldn’t be my priority,” Spear said. “We were not financially stable. We could not afford for me to go to school.”
Her higher education continued to be too costly to prioritize. Off and on for the next 10 years, Spear tried to attend classes in an attempt to polish off a degree.
Despite not yet having a finished degree, Spear said she was able to make a successful life for herself. That contributed to her self worth, but also made her wonder whether a degree — which she had thus far managed just fine without — was really necessary.
“The challenge came when I realized I was capable, smart and a fast learner,” Spear said. “I have been an executive director. I have been in high-level leadership roles. I didn’t feel the need to go back to school. I was making good money and enjoying what I was doing.”
Nevertheless, in hindsight, Spear said that her decision against completing her degree sooner was due to several factors, such as a lack of time, financial constraints, a lack of supportive community and above all a fear of failure.
“I was so afraid of not succeeding,” Spear said, “It’s so easy to put yourself to the side, and when you’re not confident in yourself, when you’re trying to raise a family, when you have other responsibilities and anxiety around school in the first place, it’s even easier.”
Spear continually stated how important it is for college students to have a tight-knit community in order to succeed in university. She explained that this sense of belonging is vital inside and outside the classroom, and that is why when she finally did return to college, she pursued an associate’s degree at a Coconino Community College — this time, following her heart and studying pre health.
“To use the world of medicine as an analogy, community colleges are the nurse practitioners of the higher education world,” Spear said. “They have bedside manners, a rapport with the patients and a holistic understanding of the patient, and that’s what a community college does for you. A doctor is like a university. They come in, they tell you what to do, they say ‘we’ll see you in two months’ and then you say goodbye.”
The small class sizes and individualized educational assistance, Spear said, is what makes community college more favorable. In Spear’s opinion, the largest issue with traditional four-year universities is their consistent prioritization of the bottom line.
“Higher education is run like a business,” Spear said. “The dollars matter more than the students, their aptitude and helping them hit their potentials. I learned very quickly that in a school of 30,000 or more students, you are really just a number.”
Spear asserted students fresh out of high school should not be expected to know how to thrive when living inside a “business” like university.
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“There has to be education available for very limited cost to the student,” Spear said. “They are not in a position to be in the middle of a business at that point. You’re young, and if you’re only looking at what you can afford as an 18 or 19-year-old, you’re going to be eating at Taco Bell the rest of your life.”
Now, Spear lives on the east side of Flagstaff with her partner, her two youngest children and her rambunctious dogs. Since having her third child, she has acted as Executive Director at Flagstaff Family Food Center and was a patient care technician at Flagstaff Medical Center during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently works for Trident Data Services managing employee security clearances.
Spear expressed she is incredibly proud of how far she has come since arriving in Flagstaff almost 20 years ago, and feels that she has been successful despite not following the stereotypical path that her family laid out for her.
“My greatest accomplishment is my resilience,” Spear said. “Having this resilience, being able to change and grow, being able to self reflect, is really important to me. It’s very easy to use typical societal markers to say you have hit a milestone or not, but if you let that dictate your life, you’ll always feel like you’re not good enough.”