Let's Get Ready Lawrence!

Val and I are both extremely excited to be working at the the Lawrence site. As a Lawrence native, it is especially rewarding for me to help our students in such a meaningful way. Our program has 6 math coaches, 6 verbal coaches and 3 substitutes, including Val and myself. Our program is slightly larger than the Summit program. We have 33 students, 75% of whom show up for class 85% of the time or more. Our site partner, the Lawrence HERC has been especially generous with their donations and their time. They constantly check in on the program to see how everything is going and to offer their help. We've run into some difficulty with our site location. Our time is limited to exactly three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and our host leaves little room for flexibility. The janitor literally kicks us out of the building at 9:00 on the dot! Despite these limitations, Val and I have tried to capitilize our time and space by printing out weekly announcements for our studenst and coaches and holding our coaches' meetings in the parking lot while our students wait for a ride home.

As for the College Choice portion of the program, we just had our first college trip on Wednesday. We went to UMass Amherst with 15 students and 5 chaperones. Val is a UMass graduate and one of our coaches, Stephanie, is a current graduate so their insider information proved very valuable for the students. They all expressed interest in the school and are very excited for our next college trip to Boston College, Northeastern, and Boston University. All but 6 students have completed their SAT registration and we are scheduled to have our seniors begin the common application on Wednesday evening. The students are a little nervous about their college essays but with the help of Jessie Hill, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale, they all have essay topics that they've been working on for the past week. To allay their financial worries, we held a scholarship panel last week exposing our students to the MLK Scholarship, Stephen Phillips Scholarship, Posse Foundation, etc. I've composed college choice folders for all of our students that contain all the information provided in our workshops along with personalized college lists. I'm very looking forward to the one on one counseling sessions with the students that I have scheduled for next week.

For the most part, things have been going well in our program. We have some typical logistical kinks that need to be worked out but Val and I are both committed to having the program run as smoothly as possible.