After a quarter-century of stop-and-go studies at UF, a married couple turned their tassels and walked across the stage in the Stephen C. O’Connell Center to receive their bachelor’s degrees.
As Ian and Patrice Fletcher, 44 and 43, received their diplomas May 5, friends and family gathered to cheer them on. Their 4-year-old son, Joshua, watched from his wheelchair.
The two met a week before Valentine’s Day at a UF Caribbean Students Association party in 1989. They started dating at the end of the semester.
During the summer, Ian Fletcher spent some weekends driving to New York to visit Patrice.
“I was out of my mind. I was crazy,” he said. By November, they were married.
The photographer lost all of the wedding photos except one. It was the one that counted, Patrice Fletcher said. They were pictured standing together at the church altar.
The newlyweds jumped back into studies at UF and tried to maintain their active student lives. She pledged with a sorority and juggled three jobs while he struggled with test anxiety. Ian Fletcher recalled his mind going blank in a statistics exam. In another math class, he failed the first three exams.
He left school to take a break and she left nursing school in 1993 for a store management position.
“Back then, what we were going through we thought was difficult,” she said. “So we gave up.”
They had a daughter, Julia, in 2000. Their son, Joshua, followed eight years later. But three weeks after Joshua’s birth, Ian and Patrice Fletcher noticed he held his hands strangely. They took him to doctors to be tested, and he was diagnosed with a rare condition called spinal muscular atrophy.
Joshua’s brain functions normally, but he can only move his eyes. However, his sense of feeling is unaffected, and he can feel kisses from his mother and father. He points his eyes toward the top of his blue-framed glasses for “yes,” and to the side for “no.”
Although he had returned to his studies at UF in 2007, Ian Fletcher withdrew for the second time to tend to family responsibilities.
“We had to learn everything …literally how to become medical associates for Joshua care,” Ian Fletcher said.
He returned to UF in the summer of 2009 to study sports radio and get into film scriptwriting. He was also working full time.
When Patrice Fletcher came back to school in 2010, she said she experienced a significant technology gap. As other students pounded out class notes on laptops, she said she could barely keep up handwriting from the PowerPoint slides. But she kept the new degree in recreation, parks and tourism in sight, and she pulled her GPA up from below a 2.0.
Now, she’s focusing on her son’s condition, and her husband now serves as vice president of workforce development for the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce.
At the close of their college journey, the Fletchers are still there to support each other. They have a faith to keep them strong — the Fletchers started a small church last year called Trinity Assembly Dream Center. And they agree they’ve matured in more ways than one.
“That’s why this graduation to us is so fulfilling,” Patrice Fletcher said.
Contact Charmaine Miller at cmiller@alligator.org.
