Briana Smalley will graduate on Friday and will walk in May with her friends.
She finished a semester early, and she’ll now look to go to law school. She wants to become a prosecutor in a special victim’s unit to advocate for children who need someone to fight for them.
Smalley is a fighter. She’s a Presidential Scholar and a Student Justice who will graduate with a degree in criminal justice and minors in women and gender studies and civic responsibility and innovation.
She’s also a Bonner Leader. For the past three years, she has volunteered with High Point Community Against Violence, a nonprofit better known as CAV.
Through her work, she has received an education in empathy. She has sat shoulder to shoulder with ex-felons and helped them with everything from building stools to reacclimating to their new life after prison.
Smalley is HPU’s Extraordinary Leader for the month of November.
She received the award because of her campus accomplishments. Yet, listen to her story and you understand why she longs to advocate for the youngest among us.
Growing up in West Palm Beach, Florida, Smalley had her own advocate. Her mom.
That made all the difference.
A Mother’s Love
Patricia Kaplan is Smalley’s mom, and she knows the exact moment when her life drastically changed.
Her daughter was 8, they were shopping at Payless, and she was leaning down, tying her daughter’s shoe when she asked about her daughter’s day in first grade.
Her daughter’s response, as Kaplan says today, “ripped my heart out of my chest.”
“I was made fun of today!” Smalley cried out. “I had these girls tell me, ‘You’re not going to play with us today. You can’t read.’ Mom, I’m dumb! Something’s wrong with me!”
Kaplan approached school officials for help, and their solution was to have Smalley repeat the first grade because of her dyslexia. Kaplan said no.
“Give me some time to get my daughter a reading tutor,” she told them. “You won’t regret it.”
She found her daughter a reading tutor. It costs $75, and her daughter needed to see the tutor an hour at least twice a week. Kaplan got busy. She saved money every way she could, looking for sales everywhere and buying groceries with coupons.
She also met with school officials regularly. She pushed for the services her daughter needed and moved her to another local school that had a better track record with helping students with learning disabilities.
Meanwhile, she worked with her daughter on her schoolwork several times a week. Sometimes, their sessions together ended near midnight. She did it for years because she remembered what her younger brother, Dennis, went through.
Like her daughter, Dennis was dyslexic. So, Kaplan knew the challenges her brother went through, and she didn’t want her daughter to endure those same struggles and be stereotyped the way he was.
By fourth grade, Smalley had become an excellent reader. The reading tutor helped. So had her mom.
“She was that pillar of hope for me,” Smalley says. “I knew I would be OK.”
Smalley Finds Focus
Smalley found High Point University through a college fair at her high school. She liked what she saw.
HPU’s Bonner Leader program, she found, offered her the chance to join like-minded students who wanted to volunteer in the community and work to make a difference where they lived.
Smalley had done the exact same thing in West Palm Beach.
In high school, she had accumulated 2,000 service hours. She made bracelets for cancer patients and volunteered once a week on the Youth Court of Palm Beach County where she served as a prosecutor.
And that’s only some of what she did.
When she came to HPU, she continued her service work. With the help of HPU’s Student Government Association, she organized a project that provided 250 baskets of household items for Leslie’s House, High Point’s only homeless women’s shelter.
Leslie’s House gave these baskets to women who left the shelter after finding a home.
Smalley also became a Student Justice and joined a board that adjudicated cases involving students and helped them get their life back on track.
“I simply do not wear my robe in court,” she says. “I wear it invisibly in everything that I do.”
Smalley did come to HPU with a passion to serve. But HPU gave her passion focus.
She became vice president of Phi Alpha Delta, HPU’s pre-law fraternity, and a brother in Alpha Phi Omega, HPU’s service fraternity. She also volunteered with a Baptist minister who showed her the compassionate side of law enforcement.
That man is Jim Summey, and his group is CAV.
A Message of Hope
In 1997, Summey created a nonprofit he called High Point Communities Against Violence because he wanted to work with police and prosecutors, residents and ex-felons to keep the city safe and help ex-felons straighten out their lives.
That has happened.
Summey has helped hundreds of ex-felons get jobs. He’s held at High Point City Hall what he calls a “call-in” in which ex-felons come in for guidance, and he’s created a partnership with a local contractor to teach ex-felons marketable construction skills.
CAV is now a High Point success story. Violent crime has dropped, the number of repeat offenders has decreased in High Point and Summey has been invited to tell CAV’s story at Harvard and inside the Senate chambers in Washington, D.C.
Then came Smalley.
On her first day, Smalley knew she was in the right place. Summey drove her around the city, sharing stories about how High Point had changed. Right away, the two connected.
“By the time you graduate, you’ll be like my granddaughter,” he told her.
“I feel the exact same way,” Smalley responded.
That connection introduced Smalley to what she calls “Jim’s message of hope.”
“I learned the importance,” she says, “of seeing people in their soul.”
HPU: Where Students Grow
Smalley learned those lessons thanks to Dr. Joe Blosser, HPU’s Robert G. Culp Jr. Director of Service Learning.
When Blosser heard Smalley talk about her interest in criminal justice, he thought immediately of CAV. So, the spring semester of her freshman year, Blosser took Smalley to a fundraiser to hear Summey talk about CAV.
That’s how Smalley’s relationship began with CAV. And with Blosser.
Smalley, a first-generation college student, confided in Blosser about her family’s struggle with paying for college. Her mom was disabled; her dad, who built fences for a living, was retired; and Smalley, their only child, worried she might have to leave.
Blosser convinced Smalley to apply for a scholarship through the High Point Community Foundation. She did, she got the scholarship and received the money needed to stay at HPU – and work with CAV.
“From her very first day here, Briana was ready to jump into the deep end and say, ‘Let’s go!,’” Blosser says. “High Point provided her a lot of opportunities and helped her develop empathy for people from all walks of life. It helped her grow, mature. It refined her passion.”
True, says Smalley.
“High Point has provided me the best 3 ½ years of my life,” she says. “It allowed me to be independent, where I felt supported by every faculty member and every community member I’ve met. I felt liberated here.”
The Importance of First Steps
Smalley also felt at home.
She has spent countless hours studying inside Cottrell Hall, sometimes staying as late as 2 in the morning. When she left, she’d always pass the water feature that anchors the Fallucca Plaza. It’s known as the International Globe. Smalley sees it as something else.
“It reminds me that I can do anything I set my mind to,” she says. “You just have to take that first step.”