© 2024 WYSO
Our Community. Our Nation. Our World.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

College Promise Aims To Support Kids Getting A Degree

Ron Solada
/
WYSO
Caleb Uekert is a first year student in College Promise who wants to study physics when he gets to college.

College Promise provides a free college education for academically gifted children from poverty impacted families here in Montgomery County. The initiative started 4 years ago and now has over 250 children selected from area middle schools on the path to a free college education, starting at Sinclair Community College and finishing at schools like Miami University, Wright State University and University of Dayton.

"Our mission with college promise is to identify, select and support 500 poverty impacted students who live in Montgomery County, and provide for them the support that they need to receive a college degree at little to no costs to them or their families," says Gary Smiga, the executive director of College Promise.

 
"We found out about College Promise via an e-mail from our school principal at the time, he thought our son Calvin would be a good candidate for this program," says Sherene Springer, the parent of a College Promise student.

With a free college education on the line there are some high expectations.
 
"[The students must] maintain good grades, stay alcohol, tobacco and drug free, and crime free, participate in school activities, come to any at large programs, practice good citizenship, maintain a financial need, attain a high school diploma, it is extremely straight forward," Springer says.
 
Caleb Uekert is a first year student in College Promise who wants to study physics when he gets to college. I asked him how do these great expectations affect him.
 
"It just encourages me to get done with everything as fast as I can, and not to slack off."
 

Credit Ron Solada / WYSO
/
WYSO
The ultimate goal of College Promise is to have 500 area students enrolled in the program.

So how do you keep hundreds of teenage kids on track for college?  Gary Smiga explains, "You just cannot just hold the carrot of a scholarship out to a fourteen year old and expect them to walk the next four years alone.  With the mentor alongside of them, there is a much greater probability that they will actually be at where you want them to be or maybe even exceed where you or they thought they could even be.  We have, such wonderful stories coming back from our mentors, about how it is such a win-win relationship, that not only is the student growing as a result of the scholarship and the time and energy the mentor is putting in, but that as adults the mentors are growing as well."

 
"The mentoring program they found out in Florida was the key to success.  After you have done this for two or three years, that you are as close to this mentee as you are your own children," says John Taylor, who discovered College Promise in Florida. 

We went to Kettering Fairmont High School and talked with Susan Harris a College Promise mentor.

"I am so amazed, that at the age of 14, 15 that they have dons such long range thinking and, and such serious thinking, about what they want to do, and granted, it may change, but the fact that they’re even, you know, thinking in those terms is terrific," she says. "Certainly at the end of four years we’re going to be good friends."

Nicole Will, a Career Tech Counselor at Fairmont High School gives us some perspective on graduation rates for poverty impacted children.

"Currently in Ohio we are seeing some pretty scary statistics for students who are considered within that poverty level, I know for students going to school for an associates degree and graduating in four years, we are only seeing 13% of our free and reduced lunch, that poverty population, in Ohio, actually completing school  and earning that degree, and for a bachelors degree it goes up to 47%, but still those are low numbers."

The graduation rates for Taking Stock in Children, the Florida Program that's a model for College Promise are 92% of the kids who enter the program graduated from high school, and then 81% graduate from college.

The collective College Promise GPA is 3.44.  Of the current 250 students, only 3 have dropped out.  The cost of the program is 25 million dollars for 500 scholarships.  The money is coming from Federal Pell Grants, the universities themselves, and over 6 million raised from private donors.

"There are some wonderful children, who are coming from struggling families, that very much deserve this opportunity, and very much want to be successful, and perhaps be the first in their families to graduate from college," says Gary Smiga.