LOUISVILLE, Ky. — State leaders are working to make going back to school more accessible for adults.

The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education recently announced an action plan to help non-traditional students return to college—or enroll for the first time.

The hope is to educate more Kentuckians, so they have the skills they need to move into better careers.

The plan includes strategies such as providing more financial help and debt forgiveness agreements to make college more affordable, providing help with basic needs like food, housing and transportation when older adults go back to school, expanding flexible academic program options for adult learners and establishing a state tax benefit for employers in the Commonwealth to reward postsecondary training for their employees.

In Hardin County, single mom and nursing student Mercedes Crawford is already taking advantage of help offered through the Kentucky Community and Technical College System.

“It’s scary. It’s a lot of stress. You’re going to gain weight. You’re going to lose hair,” Crawford laughed. “But my best advice to anybody is to communicate with your instructor, raise your hand for everything. It’s been helpful!”

Crawford spends long days practicing what she’s learning on lifelike mannequins in the school’s labs. She also picks up shifts working at Baptist Health Hardin’s hospital in Elizabethtown on the weekends. She says she knows the work she’s putting in now will pay off.

She tried going to a larger university the traditional way right after high school but said as a teen mom, it was too much.

“I had this preconception that you couldn’t go back if you failed. I know that sounds crazy, but I didn’t know I could go back to school or I probably would have sooner,” she said.

At almost 30-years-old, she began working on her Associate’s in nursing.

“Literally from the first day I was like, ‘I already love this! This is it!’ It was an exciting feeling, because school is so expensive,” she said.

Crawford works to keep a 4.0 GPA, is on the dean’s list and can afford school with several academic scholarships.

Still, she’s a single mom of four, and sometimes that’s where she needs the most help.

“This program, they realize that you’re human and life happens while you’re in school,” she said. “Things can happen, and they really try to accommodate those things.”

That’s why her kids often even join her in the lab.

For her nine-year-old son Axil, it’s a great learning experience—considering that he wants to go into the medical field like mom and be a doctor someday.

Her six-year-old, Kobi, benefits from the program’s flexibility, too.

“My youngest has epilepsy and autism,” Crawford explained of Kobi, “And his form of epilepsy, he has seizures daily. So I do, I get the phone calls. ‘Well, Kobi had a pretty bad seizure. You’ve got to come get him this time.’ And he’s been to class with me, two of my kids have been to class with me, and it’s okay.”

In fact, Kobi is the reason Crawford is in ECTC’s nursing program to begin with. She says he was perfectly healthy when he was born, but that changed when his father abused him at four-weeks-old.

“He spent 11 days in the hospital, and he didn’t wake up for the first four,” she explained. “When he finally woke up, it was so much for his body to handle he was having seizures nonstop.”

That’s where Crawford says she gained a new appreciation for nurses, like those who helped him.

“It was a real turning point in my life,” she said. “It was like, I can’t sit here. I have to do better. So, you know, the first couple of years, it was full-time care with my son. Now things are kind of calming down, and I’m getting some time to reclaim everything and work harder for them.”

With the help her scholarship provides, she was able to get a more reliable car. It not only ensures she can make it to class, but to the closest pediatric neurologist for Kobi in the area, about an hour away.

“Right now, I have to drive my son up to Louisville, and the first couple of years of his life, it was not just tight finances. I didn’t have good vehicles.”

That was another experience that’s inspired her to go into pediatric neurology herself.

“I shudder to think how many kids aren’t getting the care that they need because they live in a rural area,” Crawford said of children in Hardin County with neurological conditions like her son. “They are trying to get more specialists out here, and once I get my Master’s degree, I can bring that out here as an APRN.”

Crawford hopes turning some of her hardest times into good not only inspires her own children, but anyone else considering going back to school, as well.

“There’s always a way. No matter what’s going on, there’s always a way to climb out of that hole and make of yourself whatever you want to be.”