Nationally renowned author of "Scratch Beginnings," Adam Shepard will speak to students from Sherman and Clymer Central Schools in Sherman's John Butler Auditorium on Friday, Sept. 10.
Shepard's talk, slated for 1:30 p.m., will center on motivation toward setting realistic goals and executing a plan to achieve them.
He will deliver the message of persistence to students, a major challenge in today's world of instant gratification. He will also speak about the distractions that will show up along the way: including poor attitude, temptations and substances.
The material for his talk comes from his novel ''Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream,'' which is a memoir in which the author, in an experiment to see if the American dream is still viable, gets off a train in Charleston, S.C., and spends 70 days in a homeless shelter, with the goal of having $2,500, a car, and a place to live by the end of a year.
Attending Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., on a basketball scholarship, Shepard graduated in 2006 with a degree in business management and Spanish. Serving as a resident adviser during his years as an upperclassman, he began to take particular interest in the social issues of the nation. Shortly after graduation - with almost literally $25 to his name - Shepard departed his home state for Charleston, S.C., embarking on the journey that he chronicled in his first book, Scratch Beginnings.
Since the whirlwind journey that took his self-published book to the Today Show, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, he has sold his book to HarperCollins and made appearances on the Dave Ramsey Show and 20/20.
"Mine is the story of rags-to-fancier-rags. I'm not an extraordinary person performing extraordinary feats. I don't have some special talent that I can use to 'wow' prospective employers,'' Shepard said. ''I'm average. My story is very basic, simple. My story is about the attitude of success. My goal is to better my lot and to provide a stepping-stone over the next 365 days for everything else I want to accomplish in my life. I aim to find out if the American Dream is still alive, or if it has, in fact, been drowned out by the greed of the upper class coupled with the apathy of the lower class."
This keynote speech is a shared service between the Sherman and Clymer school districts. It is just one, in a long line, of educational experiences for the staff and students of the two districts that have been made possible through sharing services and incorporating the local BOCES in the process.