Photo by Deb Gau At the end of commencement, SMSU President Kumara Jayasuriya led the procession of faculty and graduates out of the R/A Facility.

MARSHALL — The end of the school year is a noteworthy milestone for Southwest Minnesota State University President Kumara Jayasuriya.

The freshman he welcomed when he first became president in 2019 are now graduating seniors.

In the end, Jayasuriya’s main goal for SMSU is for it to be a university where everyone can be welcomed.

“I want to create an environment where every student feels like they belong at this school. It doesn’t matter what zip code you come from, what your background is like, whether you are from another country, whether your political affiliation is right or left, I want everybody to feel like you belong,” he said.

The goal Jayasuriya has set for SMSU is all part of his journey that goes back to his birth in Panadura, Sri Lanka. The journey is full of difficulties and challenges, but his perseverance and passion have led him to this place of achievement and pride.

Panadura has roughly the same population as Mankato and is close to their nation’s capital.

His hardships began at age 13 when his father died.

“My mother raised six children and she didn’t have a job at that time. She was a teacher, but she was a stay-at-home Mom at that time. So, there was difficulty, but we had a good time.”

Due to the poverty suffered by his family, President Jayasuriya almost didn’t go to college at all.

Cricket, a bat and ball sport like baseball, was his school sport of choice. He was so good at it that he was hired to play for a semi-professional team with the chance to make the national team.

This occurred during Sri Lanka’s student gap year between tenth and eleventh grade.

“We were very poor. Once I started getting paid for this job and playing cricket for this company, I kind of got addicted to it and I was going to just continue that without going back to learning. But my mom got involved and she wanted me to go back to school,” he said.

Jayasuriya got his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate in Mathematics. He developed a love for teaching and a sense of justice, needing to do right by his students.

Early on in his career, he tutored some struggling students in his algebra class and became passionate about updating the school’s lower-level math classes. He believed that these students were not being supported when they had gaps in knowledge.

Then he was able to seize on an opportunity to make his passion for change into a reality

“The person who was in charge of our lower-level classes left. And then our chairman said, OK, you can do what you want to do by taking this. So that’s how I got into administration.”

As for the future of SMSU, Jayasuriya has many plans in place to make the campus and learning environments better for students.

The most important plan he wished for the public to know about is the leasing of the Social Science building, which will condense campus space and make classes formerly in this building more accessible.

MATEC, Marshall High School’s Technical Education division, has already announced their plans to least part of this space out for the foreseeable future.

President Jayasuriya revealed his plan for the money earned from leasing out this building.

“The lease money we get, I am committed to spending that on remodeling our older classrooms. We need to bring those classrooms to a set standard.”

By leasing out the Social Science building, President Jayasuriya seeks to improve classrooms in other buildings which have not been updated for decades.