Story by Dwain Hebda
Jaylin Sprout likes to joke that her path to the Clinton School of Public Service was set psychically when her parents moved the family to Hope, Arkansas ― the birthplace of President Bill Clinton himself ― when she was five.
In actuality, the program associate with Winrock International said her experience at the Clinton School following her graduation from Lyon College in Batesville was unlike anything she could have ever imagined.
“The Clinton School invited me to speak with the incoming class of students this year and I shared with them that I struggled initially,” she said. “I struggled like a lot of people do with imposter syndrome because I was just amazed by the caliber of my classmates and my cohort. There were so many people who were mid-career professionals who had sacrificed and moved to Little Rock to attend this program. That was something I don’t think I was really prepared for or expected.”
Part of Sprout’s difficulty stemmed from the fact that most of her Clinton School education came during COVID-19. What time she did get in person with classmates, however, more than made up for any other difficulties.
“The depth of what I learned outside of the classroom from so many of those people really shaped me,” she said.
Sprout started considering the Clinton School seriously while an undergraduate, ultimately choosing it over law school based on the pull of the public service curriculum, in the fall of 2019.
“I started thinking I would go to law school and my dad was pushing me that way,” she said, “but by the time I was done [at Lyon], I was like, ‘I don’t really think law school is for me.’ Both of my parents are educators and I’ve always prized education as a core value. Plus, I knew several students that had gone to the Clinton School and hearing about it from them it was like, ‘Nope, this feels like a good home for me.’”
Arriving in Little Rock, Sprout was eager to dive into her studies, especially the field work.
“I’ve always been very passionate about community service and being meaningfully present in whatever definition of community people subscribe to,” she said. “Lyon was great in preparing me for the academic future that I wanted to subscribe to but I felt like I didn’t get enough opportunities to really practice those skills. That was something that I was confident the Clinton School was going to provide.”
Like the other members of her cohort, Sprout’s Clinton School experience was radically altered due to the effects of the pandemic. However, she still found her projects meaningful, even if they didn’t play out overseas as she had so looked forward to.
“For my international project, I actually ended up doing a project with the Clinton School itself,” she said. “They had me develop an evaluation and monitoring toolkit to measure the impact of the field service work across projects on student learning. In the past, they had been sort of evaluating the impact of those things in silos, but they wanted to start looking at the growth and skill development that happened for students across projects.
“My Capstone was with the Arkansas Department of Education in the Office of School Safety, which was still sort of in its infancy at the time. It was developed out of the task force that former Gov. Asa Hutchinson started after the Parkland shooting in Florida. There was a national task force doing some research and there were several recommendations that came out of it, one of which was to establish a formal Office of School Safety. My Capstone ended up helping develop a plan of work for that office.”
Asked what future students to the Clinton School should be prepared for, Sprout said a willingness to be open and flexible was crucial, be it to changing circumstances or alternate opinions.
“The thing that helped me along my journey was the willingness to be open and receptive to opportunity,” she said. “I think a lot of the people who struggle are Type A folks who see things as ‘This is my plan. I’m going to stick to it. This is how I’m going to be successful.’ If you’re willing to stray from that, or even just be open and flexible in taking in new information and listening to different people’s perspectives, there’s a lot of valuable learning that can take place.”
Jaylin Sprout is a 2021 graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service and is currently a Program Associate at Winrock International. She earned her undergraduate degree in political science from Lyon College in Batesville, Ark.
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