By Peter Cox

MPR News/90.1 FM

Jeremiah Dean had a tough childhood. He grew up without a father around. He was bullied. He struggled in school. To get a new start, his mother moved them out of north Minneapolis to the suburbs when he was around 11 years old.

“So we move into a more suburban area but we’re still poor, so we’re confined on where we can live and the apartment complex we moved into was just saturated with meth,” he said. “And the kids I started to hang out with, their brothers either made it, or their fathers. It just became the thing to do.”

By the time he turned 16, he had dropped out of high school and began a years-long struggle with drugs. In 2007 he was arrested. It was a wake up call that started a journey toward getting clean. Someone with the College of St. Scholastica urged him to consider college and he enrolled.

“And I failed everything my first semester and dropped out, because again, I’m a poor reader. I had no idea how to write academically. I’ve got 19-year-old students running circles around me,” he said. “I’m 33, 32 at this time. And I just felt completely inadequate.”

But in that dark moment he heard something unfamiliar.

“I explained this to them in an exiting interview, and they were like, ‘You know Jeremiah, you haven’t failed anything. It was us who failed you,’” Dean recalled. “And that was very powerful to me because it was almost the first time that I wasn’t blamed for my failures.”

In an effort to better understand what students like Dean have been through at colleges across the state, the University of Minnesota added questions about adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, to a health survey it sends to students at 17 public and private schools in the state.

“This is the first time we’ve ever released this information about adverse childhood experiences,” said Dave Golden, the director of public health and communications at the U’s Boynton Health Services. “And the first time we know of anywhere related to college students and academic success, which we think is pretty important.”