LifeLong Learning - San Marcos
Come Learn with Us!

LifeLong Learning was founded in a place of purpose – where curiosity can continue throughout life – and continues its work in a place of gratitude.

I moved to San Marcos in 1992, leaving the superintendency of Johnson City ISD and joining the Texas State educational administration faculty. For 14 years my life in San Marcos was centered on the University until I retired in 2006 after a career devoted to public and higher education. 

My retirement felt more like graduating… transitioning. Yes, I left who I had been professionally, but my sense of purpose remained. Ahead lay the landscape of San Marcos, no longer just the place where I lived and worked, but a community waiting to be discovered. 

I joined the Hays County Master Naturalist Program, where I learned and volunteered, meeting stewards of the beautiful Hill Country from the Greenbelt Alliance and San Marcos River Foundation. I was asked to serve on a Texas State committee to consider forming a retirees’ organization and the Texas State Retired Faculty & Staff Association was created. I served as its founding president, which allowed me to meet community leaders, retired Texas State faculty and staff, and other San Marcos retirees.

My journey across the San Marcos landscape was interrupted in 2009 by a cancer diagnosis and it would be five years before I returned full time to San Marcos. This five-year period was a time of treatment, healing, and self-discovery. I married Wayne Schurter in 2011 and together, while shuttling to Houston for treatment, we spent three years in his home state of Illinois and some wintertime in Naples, Florida. While in Naples, I took art classes conducted at Rookery Bay Reserve and evening adult classes offered by the city and held in a local high school. 

On our last drive from Naples, the destination had changed. Illinois was no longer home. We decided that San Marcos would be home. As the countryside rolled past, I realized I wasn’t simply driving home… I was driving toward a new purpose.

I reflected on how deeply Wayne and I would miss the art, finance, and German classes we enjoyed in Naples, knowing those same opportunities were not available in San Marcos. That realization sparked a vision of what my own community could offer. 

In that moment of clarity, purpose met opportunity. A gap was identified – no organization in San Marcos offered classes for adult learners. I said to myself, “I will create one. I know faculty and staff, community leaders, and others with expertise they are willing to share. I can make this happen!” I was committed to making it happen.

What had once seemed like a landscape of possibilities had become a single, clear path to purpose: LifeLong Learning - San Marcos! 

Today, 12 years later, LifeLong Learning is one of approximately 275 nonprofit organizations in San Marcos, each adding immeasurably to our community’s quality of life. However, no other organization in San Marcos has as its primary mission community-based learning for adults. LifeLong Learning occupies a unique niche – it compliments rather than duplicates the work of other organizations in our community.

LifeLong Learning is, indeed, a community-based organization. Our offerings are held throughout the community, delivered by community members, and attended by community members like us! From its inception, Lifelong Learning has existed to create moments when a class, presentation, or tour sparks curiosity, inspires purpose, and rekindles the joy of discovering something new or rediscovering something we never realized we had missed.

I founded LifeLong Learning in 2014 because I saw the gap in adult community education. We have begun to bridge that gap, but the bridge is not yet complete.

It will be under Stephanie Korcheck’s directorship that the bridge building will continue. If this is your first time “meeting” Stephanie, don’t let it be your last. She is bright, articulate, experienced, fearless… and she is a builder, she has purpose. At the end of this month, she will begin her journey as the second director of LifeLong Learning, and I hope you will offer her the same support you graciously extended to me. 

My final thought…

In all my planning and thinking, I had not imagined how much I would learn alongside you; how we would share a sense of purpose, build a community of lifelong learners, and experience together moments of curiosity, discovery, and joy.

For all this, I am deeply grateful to you.

See you at a class soon!