Larry Joe Fitzpatrick was certain he had saved his guidance counselor a ton of work. Even before the start of his senior year at Lawrence County High School in 2005, his college planning was already finished.

“I was not going to college,” Fitzpatrick said. “I didn’t think I’d ever make it into college, so I was just going to go to work after graduation.”

Luanne Finley, a Lawrence County guidance counselor, remembers thinking that Fitzpatrick would either join the military or go to a technical school. “He was in ROTC, and he liked to work on cars,” she said.

For Fitzpatrick, who lives in the small eastern Kentucky town of Martha, it was enough that he would soon be achieving another important goal — becoming the first member of his family to graduate from high school.

“I’m one of 13 kids,” he said. “Six sisters, seven brothers, and I’m the first one to graduate.”

Enter Amy McLoney, KHEAA’s outreach counselor for North Eastern Kentucky. McLoney visited Lawrence County High School in the fall of 2005 to train students and staff on using the GoHigherKY website.

The GoHigherKY website was new at the time, Finley said, so they were registering the whole student body on the site. The school just does the training for freshmen now.

“That was the first time I ever saw him interested in college,” Finley said. “The day we were training on GoHigher, I remember he turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Do you think I could go to college?’”

The next day, Finley brought Fitzpatrick into her office for an in-depth training session on the website. “I’ll be honest,” he said, “I didn’t understand a lot of what was on there, and I was stubborn. But Ms. Finley sat me down and made me look at it. She broke it all down and explained it to me.”

Fitzpatrick said the breakthrough moment came when he was completing GoHigher’s Interest Finder exercise (under Career Center), the program that identifies a student’s aptitudes and interests and matches them with a career.

“Education matched first,” he said. “That’s the cool part about it. My teachers had always told me that I’d make a good teacher because I was good working with (underclassmen).”

Fitzpatrick, who averaged three sports a year in high school, said that picking physical education as his major was a no-brainer. Finding the right college, however, took a little more time.

“I use the GoHigher and KHEAA websites almost on a daily basis,” Finley said, adding that it’s more convenient for her to link to college websites from GoHigher rather than retype the website name every time. It was from GoHigherKY that Finley and Fitzpatrick linked to the websites of schools close to Lawrence County. He chose Alice Lloyd College.

“We found out from an Alice Lloyd financial advisor that he qualified for veterans’ benefits,” Finley said. Because his father is a disabled Vietnam veteran, Fitzpatrick qualifies for a waiver from Alice Lloyd, which will allow him to complete his education free of tuition or loans.

Fitzpatrick, now 18, is currently into his second semester as a freshman at Alice Lloyd, but he hasn’t forgotten the encouragement he received in high school. “My coaches and teachers cared. So many people have helped me hang in there,” he said, remembering the 45-minute bus rides to and from school every day. “Now my goal is to help other students.”

Fitzpatrick also remembers the GoHigherKY training that first sparked his college dreams. “Any student who thinks they can’t go to college should look at it,” he said. “Give it a chance.”

This article originally appeared in the January 2007 GoHigherKY.org newsletter as “GoHigherKY.org sparks college dreams.” It appears here courtesy of GoHigherKy.org, Kentucky’s statewide online college planning resource, KHEAA and The Student Loan People.