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When Marybeth Palmer ’70 graduated from Chamberlain High School in Tampa, she remembers being the only one out of a class of nearly 600 who planned to attend the University of Tampa.

Decades later, Palmer is still one of the University’s biggest cheerleaders. She’s happy to explain Plant Hall’s history to passersby on the Riverwalk who wonder what the minarets are or give a tutorial to the Apple Support technician who asks her about the “castle” featured in her laptop screensaver. “That’s my school; that means something to me,” she’ll say.

That’s why Palmer recently established a planned estate gift to the Spartan Alliance Endowment Fund to make a university education more accessible to students from Tampa high schools. The University was founded to serve students in the community, and she wants to keep it that way, she said. It should be easy for local kids to become a Spartan, after growing up down the street from campus.  

Palmer’s decades-long career as a music teacher in Tampa and Atlanta showed her firsthand how educational resources and opportunity affect quality learning. Her first full-time position out of college was teaching music to elementary students at two Tampa schools. She was spread so thin between them, she said, that the classes were too surface-level and short for children so young to fully grasp the concepts and develop a genuine interest.

She then found a position in Atlanta teaching high school band, which she did for 23 years. But after so many band camps, bus rides and concert performances, her career goals began changing. 

She moved on to a public elementary school in downtown Atlanta, where the requirements of uniforms and entrance tests led to disciplined, engaged students, she said. When she started with the school, there were about 20-something students in the band, and when she retired five years later, there were more than 200.

“A lot of those kids I stay in touch with today,” said Palmer. And even though most of them did not end up being musicians, “they can still appreciate the foundations of what they had.”

When Palmer returned to Tampa in retirement, she joined the board of the Chamberlain High School Legacy Alliance, and at UTampa, she established the Marybeth Palmer Music Education scholarship to award students the same opportunity she was given as a scholarship student. Later, she learned about the Spartan Alliance program, which spoke to her desire to assist students who might not otherwise have a chance to pursue higher education. 

Palmer hopes that her gifts can allow students of the Tampa community to pursue a passion for music that she shares with them.