Presented at the 2015 Commencement Ceremony at Franklin & Marshall College

In the village of Essiam in Ghana's Central Region, where most dwellings are cinder-block walls with tin roofs, a family that earns more than $2 a day is rare. This is the pervasive poverty from which Robert Kwesi Koomson rose to become a celebrated high school mathematics teacher and an education pioneer in his homeland.

Even as a child, Mr. Koomson was recognized for his impressive intellect and charisma. He earned scholarships to prep schools in England, and later to college and graduate schools in the United States. As an undergraduate at Franklin & Marshall College, he earned a degree in mathematics, later going on to earn a master's degree at Villanova University and an MBA at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

In the fall of 1997, he joined the faculty at the Westtown School, a diverse, 216-year-old, Quaker-founded K-12 preparatory school that welcomes students from around the world to its 600-acre campus in suburban Philadelphia.

In addition to teaching math, Mr. Koomson coaches the boy's varsity soccer team and is a dorm parent. Yet, he never lost sight of the great need for educational opportunity in his native Ghana. A nation of 24 million people with half the population estimated at 15 years old and younger, Ghana's public school system is severely underfunded. Mr. Koomson knew from his personal experience that most students in rural areas do not receive the caliber of education that allows them to pass the national, standardized test — the basic education certificate examination (BECE) — that is required to attend high school.

Determined to offer young people from similar backgrounds a chance, Mr. Koomson responded to this tremendous need by doing what many would have said was impossible — building a school that teaches critical thinking and prepares students to succeed in high school, in college and in life. In 2004, he founded the Heritage Academy, a licensed co-educational primary and junior high day school in Ajumako, Ghana, West Africa, that has grown from an initial enrollment of just 32 students taking classes in a small church to more than 1,300 students in Ajumako and a recently added second location in Ochiso village.

Historically, the pass rate in the two villages for public school students taking the BECE had been 0%. Even for private school students, only half, on average, were able to pass and continue their studies in senior high school. Since 2009, 100% of Heritage Academy students have passed the national exam.

Mr. Koomson has made more than 15 trips to the Heritage Academy, and serves as executive director of the Schoerke Foundation — a nonprofit education philanthropy founded in 2006 by his wife, Melissa Schoerke Koomson. Later this year, they will relocate to Ghana for a year of teaching at the academy.

For their work in providing an education that will allow students in Africa to succeed, the couple was honored in 2014 with the Friends Council on Education's Leadership Award for Service to Society, presented to them by Dr. Jill Biden.

Robert Kwesi Koomson, for your deep commitment to expanding educational opportunity and your extraordinary efforts to establish Heritage Academy and promote the academic success of students in Ghana, Franklin & Marshall College bestows upon you the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters.

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Citations:

Richard Plepler '81: Doctor of Letters

Sherry Turkle, Ph.D.: Doctor of Science

Lynn Matluck Brooks: Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching

Michael L. Anderson: Bradley R. Dewey Award for Outstanding Scholarship

Robert Gray: Socrates Citation

Cecile Zorach: Socrates Citation

Lina Bernstein: Socrates Citation

Christine Alexander: Richard Kneedler Distinguished Service Award