WEST MEMPHIS -- Glen Fenter is a singer.
He's the leader of a band, sure. But he also sings praises -- praises about the Delta, education, jobs.
The former Mid-South Community College president has opinions about higher education and job training. He has an idea of what works and what doesn't.
And if his chattiness about those things doesn't prove it, just ask him about the city he called home for the past 25 years, the college where he worked for the past 23 years or his new job just across the Mississippi River helping the Delta.
"If I had a dime for every time he's said the words 'our region' or 'the Delta,' I could have retired a long time ago," said former state Higher Education Department Director Shane Broadway, a friend and former legislator. "He's so passionate about the area where Mid-South is and the people that they serve."
Fenter -- who is officially leaving the college Tuesday -- never meant to stay in West Memphis as long as he did. But, once he got there, he never really thought about leaving.
"At that time, and even today, West Memphis is a place that is very special in that it has a lot of great people," he said. "It is a place that, again then and today, still has tremendous potential. There are factors -- many of which are beyond their control -- that have kept them from maximizing that potential."
In 1990, Fenter chose to become the principal of West Memphis' high school. The native of Charleston in Northwest Arkansas got the job offer the same day he got one from the Fayetteville School District, closer to home.
"I just remember that I didn't even know how to get to West Memphis," he said. "As corny as it sounds, I prayed about it and just felt like the kids in West Memphis probably needed more help."
Shortly after his arrival in West Memphis, state legislators passed a law allowing vocational-technical schools -- like the one there -- to become technical or community colleges.
The state's higher-education leaders had reviewed the existing vocational-technical schools to see what each institution had to do to carry out the change.
"And ours was chosen rather unceremoniously as the institution with the largest challenges, the least capacity and, probably in their mind, was one that should have been targeted for closure," Fenter said.
"At that time, we were really too dumb to know that we couldn't do it. And we knew our region was suffering from the effects of not having access to postsecondary education when it was very important."
After two years in the public school sector, Fenter made a switch and took charge of a property tax campaign to help the vocational-technical school transform into a community college.
At 30, he was ready for the challenge.
"How many chances do you get at 30 years of age to start something that could be potentially that powerful and that meaningful in that many lives?" he asked. "I guess the bottom line is I knew that it needed to be done."
The pieces started falling into place.
Crittenden County voters overwhelmingly supported the 12 percent property tax increase. The state's Department of Higher Education approved the college's first degree program. The college's board of trustees announced plans for a $6 million campus renovation and expansion program. Enrollment reached 139.
And Fenter became the college's leader.
Sort of.
Higher-education leaders didn't approve of him being hired for that position for at least a couple of years, he said. Maybe it was his lack of experience. Maybe it was his lack of formal training. Maybe -- he thought -- it was their concern for his sanity. After all, it was a huge undertaking.
"As I remember all of that, it was embarrassing," Fenter said. "It was aggravating because actually their failure to accept that meant that I couldn't even earn the salary that I was supposed to. I remember my wife questioning my sanity on several occasions for getting put in that position because it was nowhere near what they had described."
That didn't slow him down, though.
Throughout the '90s, he worked to earn a national accreditation for the community college. He fished around in hopes of securing funds from the state, from grants, from private donors -- anything, really, that could help the college grow.
In June 1997, the college scored. The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation gave it an $8 million grant for a 64,000-square-foot student and community services center.
"It set the tone for the entire campus," Fenter said. "It changed everything about what we aspired to in terms of our facilities. But most importantly, it gave the community something to take a lot of pride in."
In 1999, he began courting the White House.
Officials at the college submitted a concept paper for a workforce-development program, a precursor to what is now the Arkansas Delta Training and Education Consortium (ADTEC). The college wanted $35 million to create training sites on community college campuses in the region.
That funding never came through.
Some time later, federal officials announced the construction of a new federal prison in Forrest City in east Arkansas.
"The two things ... were never remotely connected politically or funding-wise," Fenter said. "But I think it was one of my first lessons in reality that, unfortunately, we're not as excited about being proactive in creating opportunities for folks as we should be. We always end up having to find money to take care of the bad consequences of not appropriately empowering people to achieve their potential."
So, he started looking elsewhere. The smaller funds: $1 million from Southland Park Gaming and Racing, $295,000 from Ford Motor Co., $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Rural Housing and Economic Development.
In 2001, West Memphis philanthropist Thomas Goldsby Jr. helped the college start a scholarship program for high school students enrolling in college-credit courses.
The college picked up momentum after getting those contributions.
In 2005, it took a hit. Toyota Motor Corp. had been considering an area near Marion in Crittenden County for a new manufacturing plant, but for the second time, it chose an out-of-state site.
"The state declared that the loss was to be blamed on the lack of our region's ability to provide for a workforce," Fenter said. "They failed to acknowledge that the reason that the workforce was not in place was that they had not chosen to fund it."
That blow made Fenter and other college officials redouble their efforts.
Fenter credits former U.S. Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., for helping in that redoubled effort.
"[Berry] said, 'If you want me to really help you change eastern Arkansas, then you come up with a plan that will let everybody win, and I will help you significantly,'" Fenter recalled. "Well, that was the beginning of the ADTEC consortium that from 2005 until today has secured something on the order of $65 million."
The consortium partners with in-state and out-of-state universities to allow students obtain four-year and graduate degrees on the Mid-South campus.
In 2008, the U.S. Department of Labor recognized Mid-South's workforce development program as the best in the nation. It's one of the proudest moments in Fenter's tenure there.
"We are not winning the war," he said. "We are not changing the economy. We are not affecting lives nearly to the extent that we should be. Because we are still so grossly underfunded. It is the case that you can have great models, but if you don't fuel them and you don't appropriately support them, those models don't work as efficiently and as effectively as you would like."
In 23 years, Fenter has built Mid-South from basically the ground up, friends say.
The school has gone from 139 students in 1993 to nearly 1,900 in the fall of 2014. What started off as three buildings grew into a multisite campus. He had pictures of the old campus hanging in his office.
Fenter is a storyteller, and his favorite stories are of the students who went through Mid-South -- the ones from the Delta, the ones who statistically weren't likely to succeed. But they did.
He'll tell their stories, recalling the person's struggles. He'll tear up, and his good-ol'-boy voice will slow down with the telling.
"It's those stories and those victories one at a time that always kept him going," Broadway said.
He's made fast friends and allies because of that passion. It's contagious.
With Berry, the two shared a love of eastern Arkansas. They also loved raccoon hunting.
"When I first met him in 1995, we just clicked," Berry said. "We both wanted to work to improve the educational opportunities for students in the Delta, and I believe we both helped each other to do just that. Through that process, we became great friends, and I always look forward to our visits."
Berry's then-Chief of Staff Chad Causey said the first time he met Fenter, he thought the college leader sounded a lot like former President Bill Clinton.
"He's a great speaker," Causey said. "He can see a vision for West Memphis. I think what he helped build at Mid-South Community College is a testament to his fortitude to accept challenges and, I think, to overcome them."
Throughout Fenter's career at Mid-South, many have tried to lure him away, friends said. When other state colleges or universities had vacancies, his name was always in the loop, Causey said.
It took the Greater Memphis Alliance for a Competitive Workforce -- now his new job across the Mississippi River -- three times to hook him.
"They called me, asking, 'Do you know about Glen?'" Broadway said of Fenter. "I said, 'You can't have him.'
"[Fenter] struggled with it." He wanted to leave Mid-South in good hands.
In January, the college merged with the Arkansas State University System.
"When I decided that I needed to make the move to Memphis, that seemed like a very appropriate time to bring some additional resources to the community," he said. "By joining the ASU System, I think we're putting our community in a great position to continue to build upon its strengths and address its weaknesses."
In a sense, Fenter's move to the Memphis nonprofit is actually expanding his platform.
The nonprofit is "designed to get above the fray in politics and higher-education traditional models, and really focused on one thing: creating educational models that are designed to produce the skill sets that the companies in the region need to not just compete but win, and then empower the people who live in the region to get the skills to get those jobs."
Success in Memphis can lead to success in eastern Arkansas, Fenter is sure of it. The two areas are inextricably linked, he said.
Even though he'll be across the river, he won't stop helping the Arkansas Delta, he assured.
"When it's all over, what you want to know is that you helped as many people as you can, as much as you can and as often as you can, and in any way that you can," he said.
"And for a lot of the people that we deal with, some of that help is very simplistic yet extremely powerful. You know how much positive impact you can have with very little resources, and you don't ever want to stop being able to do that. Because there's a steady stream of people coming that need it."
Metro on 06/29/2015