DES MOINES, Iowa -- Teenagers arrive daily at the West Des Moines home of Ramona Barber, and some expect a psychic.
Parents prefer the title "Teen Whisperer."
Across a paper-stacked kitchen table is a welcoming, no-nonsense woman of 62 with a reputation that stretches across Iowa and beyond.
Barber has an uncanny ability to get inside the teen mind — to go beyond the surface of their monetary dreams, to cast off what others expect, to burrow under even their own faulty self-perceptions — and come out the other side with a life plan that suits them.
She has never advertised and rarely has been interviewed. Yet Barber, who could generically be called a private college counselor, has a waiting list that stretches four months, even while putting in 12-hour days. She has clients from all over the United States, plus Brazil, Hong Kong and Portugal. Parents pool their money and fly her to Florida or Boston.
"Her reputation is legendary," said Tom Stark, an Ames orthodontist whose four children all were whispered to by Barber. "She will get these kids to open up to her in a way that is magical. When she sat down with our oldest, Emily, 1 1/2 hours after she met she knew her as well as we did."
Emily wanted to be a dog nurse, or help the homeless. Turns out she was better suited to accounting.
How does Barber perform her feats — entering the mind of a 17-year-old?
"I don't think you go to LeBron James and ask, 'How do you do this?' If you could, we would have a significant number of pro athletes," said Barber, who is not without her critics, especially in school counselor circles.
"All I know is for as long as I can remember, I have been able to sit down with a young person, talk to them, and get glimmers of what is going on in their mind. And somehow I'm able to turn these glimmers into a platform of how to go forward."
Parents will typically pay $300 to do this, and gladly, considering the high-stakes gamble that a college education can be these days. And because kids, Barber said, have a natural block when it comes to listening to their parents.
Take the case of Katie Campbell. She is a 17-year-old high school senior who visited Barber in November. She was convinced she wanted to be a choir teacher. She loves singing in the high school choir and playing in band. Performing gives her great joy. And, after all, that's what her older brother had decided for his career.
Barber asked Campbell for her favorite TV shows and colors, what she liked and didn't, all the stuff she thought had nothing to do with her future.
Then she was asked to stand up and face Barber, who drew close to peer into her eyes, describing what she saw deep inside with a poetic soliloquy that left Campbell a bit dazed.
"It's crazy how she can read someone, the way she figured out I loved the spotlight and liked being around people, but loved my alone time," Campbell said. "It's a gift, really."
Then the conversation turned. She asked what Campbell really liked and really didn't. Turns out, although she enjoys the spotlight, she doesn't like to lead. She loves writing in a journal every day. They later talked about working in publications, writing or designing.
"I was completely blown away by it," said Campbell, who went home to write about it in her journal.
"I came to the conclusion in my journal that when I'm writing I'm not super scared about college and leaving home. I'm actually excited. My whole life I've been in my brother's footsteps. Now I feel like I'm forging my own path."
To understand Barber, one most go back to her father and her illness. Her father lived behind the Iron Curtain but escaped, using his prowess at soccer to put himself through school in Germany before coming to the United States and earning a doctorate at Penn State University.
Barber was an asthmatic child. "The beautiful thing about it is I became an observer. While the kids were playing in gym I was observing and reading," Barber said.
Her parents sent her to the Colorado mountains for college because of her poor health. She went into marketing and had an internship lined up in Paris, but got married instead at 19. It was the late 1960s and women followed their husbands, she said. Teaching was a way to help her husband through graduate school.
What she found was her own latent skill in connecting with kids. After moving to Des Moines in 1983, she was busy raising her own four kids, who had their grandfather's skills at soccer. Two went on to play college soccer. One daughter was the captain of the Harvard team and today is married to Buffalo Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick.
Soccer helped Barber, too. It was the entry to her new profession. She spent a lot of time on the sidelines and began talking to kids, asking them their hopes for the future. Soon other players were asking to talk to her, then parents. Finally, she had to start charging $25, such was the demand on her time.
It led to working with kids in athletics. She launched and still runs the popular College Search Kickoff in Muscatine every year, matching college recruiters with high school talent.
By word of mouth it spread to others — to doctors' kids and farmers' daughters, artistic students and science geeks. Private college counselors are more common on the East Coast and often charge more than $1,000, Barber said.
She has resisted raising her prices to reach all kids, not just the wealthy, she said.
Is it worth it?
Most college students change their majors one or more times, potentially adding years and thousands of dollars to the bill.
A wrong career choice can also negatively affect the rest of their lives.
"Every student that comes in, I have this fear of failing them," Barber said. "It's like going into a game — a fear that you are not going to be able to do what you can for the team."
Some teens see it as magic.
"There's not voodoo going on," said Kelly Rapp, a 2009 high school graduate who took Barber's advice, attended Baylor University and became the student body president. "She can be quirky, but I still call her for advice."
So many were seeking her out, the Waukee High School newspaper even wrote a piece about Barber, although she's so busy they couldn't reach her for comment.
"Most of the students thought she was good. Others thought that everything she said was wrong," said Bailey Smith, the author of the piece. "But a lot of people were shocked that she knew so much about them."
Barber has other critics.
"School counselors run from supportive to antagonistic, high antagonistic," said Barber. One Iowa high school counselor even called her "that brain-sucker from Des Moines."
Barber says she has more time than overburdened high school counselors to work with children individually in three-hour sessions and can go beyond giving everyone equal time and boilerplate advice.
"I am crazy, off the wall, and I do as I please," she said.
Revealing aptitude is her trademark and the difficult part, but the second half of her session is the nitty-gritty — all the test scores, scholarships available and course requirements. Money is at stake.
"It's like people who take advantage of tax loopholes," she said. "The way I look at it is why should my students pay a price in opportunity because they don't know the system. Counselors aren't geared to put out loopholes in the education system.
"It can seem sleazy to some. I don't let it bother me."
She also cites examples of families who saved money because their child was able to opt out of foreign language requirements because of a learning disability, or those who mistakenly thought they had to take chemistry their junior instead of senior year of high school, which could lower their grade point average and foil admission to an in-state public school. Out-of-state tuition can mean an additional several thousand dollars.
Barber won't sugarcoat it, though. She is dealing with parents.
They are invited in to hear conclusions after the student interview. Some don't take it well. They know their kid should be a doctor and no guru in her kitchen is going to tell them otherwise.
One kid, she found, was suited to her desires of marketing. Her mother stormed out, convinced her daughter was a food scientist.
"Some people don't like it because I tell them what they don't want to hear," she said. "I don't want you to get the idea it is all light and sweet."
She doesn't want students hating their life because they are in the wrong field, but will accept basic survival with a decent-paying job as a consolation.
"I will ask myself when they walk out the door: Did they get their $300 worth? I figured if they haven't, the phone will stop ringing," she said. "It hasn't."
No comments:
Post a Comment