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Tennessee Reconnect and Promise. Graduating high school seniors can attend tuition-free. Free tuition for adults.Tennessee Reconnect and Promise. Graduating high school seniors can attend tuition-free. Free tuition for adults.
Online degrees available. Choose from seven completely online programs.Online degrees available. Choose from seven completely online programs.

News: Roane State gives student opportunity for affordable education

Hannah Duncan

March 30, 2017

By Bob Fowler
Staff WRiter

HUNTSVILLE, Tenn. – She should have listened to her parents.

Looking back, that’s what Hannah Duncan says of her costly mistake to not take advantage at first of Roane State’s Scott County campus and the Tennessee Promise scholarship.

It ended up costing her more than $18,000 in student loans, some of which carry interest rates of 7 percent.

Now, the recently wed Scott County native has pushed the restart button and returned to the Roane State’s W.H. Swain Scott County Center, nestled in a pastoral setting off Huntsville’s Main Street.

Her first college choice was driven by an urge for “big city life,” the 21-year-old recalls.

She graduated from Scott County High School in 2013 and was all set to enter Roane State at its Scott County campus.

She had even been doing the required community service work to become eligible for Tennessee Promise, that last-dollar scholarship to pay for costs not covered by other grants and scholarships.

Her parents, J.T. and Connie Crampton, had urged her to go to Roane State and live at home.

But Duncan, after growing up in Scott County’s tiny Pioneer community, wanted to experience big city life. She instead enrolled at the four-year Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville.

The Tennessee Promise grant is only awarded to students enrolled in community colleges.

She moved into a dormitory at TTU and experienced what she called a “big culture change.”

“I wasn’t used to being around a lot of people,” she said. Her parents paid for her first two semesters, and Duncan said she moved off campus in the fall of 2014. She reluctantly took out a student loan then; the first of several.

She said she finally realized it made sense, both fiscally and for her education, to move back home and enroll in the TTU interdisciplinary studies program offered at Roane State’s Scott County campus.

And that’s what she did. “I saved a lot of money moving back home,” said Duncan, who later married in April 2016 and still lives in Scott County. “It’s interesting to go away from here, to experience things, but I should have taken the Tennessee Promise grant.”

Duncan is studying business now, with plans to become a developmental manager, perhaps for her Dad, the owner of a construction firm titled Trim Craft LLC.​

To learn more about academic programs at Roane State’s Scott County campus, call (423) 663-3878.

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