Kaira Clapper

By now, Kaira Clapper of Lehigh Acres, a 22-year-old college graduate, is in Spain and is getting ready to teach English in a private school. She will be there for about a year, she said before she boarded a plane last week from Fort Myers to Atlanta where she would fly directly to Madrid. She was due to arrive Sept. 1 in southern Spain.

She is an honors graduate at the University of Central Florida in Orlando where she received a bachelor of arts degree in Spanish.

She is going to Spain under a local scholarship that will take care of most of her expenses and in addition, she said, she will get paid for teaching English.

“I love Spain and visited there once while in high school; that is why I am so excited about going back,” she said.

Her family says they are very proud of Kaira and plan to keep up with over the Internet using Skype where they can talk and view each other in real time on their computers.

With family: Kaira Clapper is shown here with her mother and one set of grandparents just days before she flew out of Fort Myers to Atlanta and then onto Spain where she was expected to arrive Sept. 1. Photo by Mel Toadvine

She was a top student in college, but said she had to study hard.

“There are so many dialects in Spanish and I worked hard to learn the language,” she said. She believes she will be teaching English in Seville, Spain.

She will be studying, too, at the University of Alcala in Alcala De Henarea, Spain. She was told the program was from nine months to a year.

Other students from all over the U.S. will be there, too, and she said she was really excited in making friends and meeting new people.

Her eventual plans one day, she said, are to teach language on the university level. And she said she realizes she will need more than one master’s degree. One day, she hopes to get her doctorate which will help her gain tenure as a professor.

“I want to get a second masters degree definitely in education,” she said.

Her mom, Kori Clapper said some in the family may consider visiting her in Spain. Her grandparents, Ruth and Dick Minnig said they couldn’t be prouder of their granddaughter.

“We watched her march in to her college graduation and sit on the stage and was recognized,” Dick Minnig said. “We family members were also recognized. We could not have been prouder,” he said, admitting a few tears may have built up in his eyes.

She calls those grandparents Nannie and Pappy and they live across the street. Her father, John Clapper, also said he is proud and impressed with his daughter’s accomplishments.

On his side of the family are Doris and John Clapper and all live in Lehigh Acres.

Kaira said she applied for the program and had learned about it on Facebook from a friend.

“I wanted that to be my life and I wanted to go back to Spain,” she said. “It hasn’t hit me yet that I am going I am so just too excited.”

While there she hopes to start a private blog for her family so they can keep up with her activities, her feelings and her excitement.

No wonder her family is proud of her. Kaira had the highest GPA, a 4.0 of all the graduates for the college in the arts and humanities program.

“It sure was an honor,’ she said. She was awarded a medal on stage for her academic achievement.

“The Kiwanis Club of Lehigh Acres is helping to provide me this scholarship and they should really be recognized for all the good they do. Other monies are coming from the Bright Futures program in Florida.

“The exciting thing is that they are also going to pay me to teach and I think it will be in a private school.

“Imagine that, getting a stipend to teach and all the while being there on scholarship. I am hoping to start saving, but just being in Spain, there may be a lot of things to do and things to buy,” she laughed.

The family saw her off last week and this week will more than likely be turning on their webcams to talk to her. She took her laptop computer so communicating will be easy from both sides of the Atlantic.