Where are they now: Allison Hudgins

An old, white shipping container rests two hours west of Panama City, secluded in an area lush with trees and other plant life. Once used during the construction of the Panama Canal, dents and chips are now splattered across the walls, and small windows let in as much of the glaring Panamanian sun as they can. Step inside the metal structure, however, and one will encounter fresh air conditioning, maps adorning the walls and books atop an array of grey folding tables. It is a place meant for learning. For inside this shipping container in rural Panama, there is a school called Five Star Academy, and its founder is 1991 KHS graduate Allison Hudgins.

Hudgins started the school with two other women in 2011, and since then, the school has grown from five students to over 70, with over 20 different nations represented in the student body. Hudgins emphasized that many aspects of the school serve to make it unique. Students work through recycled textbooks ordered off Amazon. They learn how to raise ducks and pigs as often as they learn math and science. Some can speak up to four languages. But despite this lack of standard practices, every faculty member has at least a Master’s Degree in teaching, and they stress a challenging academic curriculum for all students. And while some financial troubles exist, Hudgins said the academy has grown beyond anything she thought possible.

“If I was in it for the money, I would have gotten out a long time ago,” Hudgins said. “We are in it for our kids’ education. It’s really cool to watch these kids and to see how the world opens up to them [at this school].”

If someone had asked Hudgins 30 years ago what she would be doing now, never in a million years would she have said facilitating her own school, she said. She was too afraid of missing out on opportunities to plan far into the future. After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she began work on political campaigns in Washington D.C. She eventually became disillusioned to politics, however, and she and her husband both felt the need for a change. So when an opportunity arose in the late ‘90s to start a company exporting coffee in Sierra Leone, they accepted, even though the nation was in the midst of a civil war. But just a short time later, they were back in the states. Their company had gone belly up, losing investor money as well as their own.

“When we got back to the states, our tails between our legs, we had no money and no job,” Hudgins said. “But my mindset was really just to use what we had learned in that crazy experience [for] future adventures in my life and see how I could apply those lessons to ensure [those failures] don’t happen again.”

Her family did not remain in the United States for long. They soon decided to pack up again to live in Panama for a year, operating a vacation rental company. But a year came and went, and Hudgins still was not ready to return to an office job, much less to the United States. So two years went by. Then three. By this time, Hudgins’s children were of school age, so she began homeschooling them out of necessity, dealing with spotty internet access and a serious lack of material. Eventually, Hudgins met a woman in roughly the same situation as her, and she happened to know a missionary who had recently arrived from Florida with a plan to open a school. The three met to talk, and Five Star Academy was born not long after. And while she has stayed put ever since, she said she is not sure what the future has in store.

“When it comes to [my] career, I don’t plan anything,” Hudgins said with a light laugh. “Anything long-term, I don’t plan. I can’t plan. Because I think people get stuck in their own head about what the plan is supposed to be. It is very important to be completely flexible and just go where life takes you.”

Mike Wade, KHS associate principal, knew Hudgins as a high schooler, and said that she was the most independent kid he knew at the time. According to Wade, if you told her to go right, she would go left. She was, he said, a terror on the administration. Wade remembers her outside-the-box way of thinking best of all, and believed even then that she was going to be successful at anything she did.

“There are people we’ve seen at [KHS], some very unique individuals, who you know are going to figure it out, one way or another,” Wade said. “They’ll have some bumps and bruises, but they’ll end up on the other side in a pretty good place. That was Allison in high school, and that is Allison now. I can’t say a bad thing about her.”

Marie Clair Beauvil, the missionary who helped Hudgins found the school, has known Hudgins since 2010. She came to Panama with the sole purpose of starting a school for those in need, but had been unsuccessful. Beauvil was preparing to leave until she heard that there was a woman who desperately wanted to meet and bring the school to life. So Beauvil agreed, and thus, the two met. Right away, Beauvil was impressed with Hudgins’s drive.

“Some people would be hesitant living in a new country and starting a school,” Beauvil said. “People would be afraid of it, and she just wasn’t. She’s not afraid to start something new, something different. That’s something I love about her.”

But Hudgins, after all, is only human. She said she gets anxiety all the time. There are times when she can reach near panic attacks, thinking of all the ways any given situation could go bad. It’s scary, she said. Scary to live in a new country. Scary to try and start a school with no background in education. Scary to not know what the future will hold. But she does not let these fears get to her.

“You can’t let fear or anxiety stop you from moving forward,” Hudgins said. “You can either let it stop you and paralyze you to where you don’t get out of bed, or you can go exactly where you are being led. Even if I fail, it doesn’t matter. I’ve learned to use that anxiety to push me forward and motivate me.”

Above all else, Beauvil praises Hudgins for her strength. The strength to do all she can to better the lives of her children. The strength to seek out new opportunities even if they are thousands of miles away. The strength to move past her failures. Most importantly, Beauvil is a firm believer that Hudgins has the strength to improve the world.

“People deserve to know about people like that,” Beauvil said. “People who can change the world. Someone strong enough to create new things and make the world a better place. Those people deserve to be known. And I’m just honored to know someone like her.”