Program helps put students on the path to college

Nwando Ofokansi just finished looking over a stack of college essays. It's for "her kids," she says. They may not be technically a part of her family tree, but by the time she's seen them through the Sure Track to College program in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, they feel like family. 

She's known some of them through the after-school College Ready Communities Program, run by NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley (NWBRV), since they were in kindergarten. 

This year, like last year, she'll probably join them for graduation dinners as they finish one part of their education and prepare to attend college — many of them the first member of their family to do so. "They're with me, they graduate and then they're my kids," she says. "They come to me for anything and everything." 

The goal of the College Ready Communities program is to make sure that youth in the community are prepared for college, says Margaux Morisseau, director of community building and engagement for NWBRV. "When youth feel prepared and understand the process, they are much more likely to attend college, which will then increase their earning potential as adults. And it works." She says 94 percent of the students who enter the free program attend college. This compares to 44 percent in Woonsocket, a city where more than one in four children lives in poverty, according to the Rhode Island Kids Count Factbook. 

Morisseau says the Sure Track program began because some of their students weren't getting as much attention as they needed from high school guidance counselors with heavy caseloads. "They tended to focus on more typical college students," she says. "We saw the need to increase planning and support."

A NeighborWorks VISTA volunteer helped put together a curriculum, and they began the program with juniors and seniors around 2005. They soon added younger students to ensure they were taking appropriate classes to put them on the college track.

The program is supported by a mixture of self-sustaining funds and grants. The community has six apartments that educators live in rent-free in exchange for working 16 hours a week in the youth program. NWBRV contributes funds through a resident services line item in the property budgets. The program also receives funding from the Hasbro Summer Learning Initiative through the United Way. "We are critically underfunded and constantly looking for additional grants," Morisseau says.

Ofokansi works with approximately 40 students at a time. She groups them by the year they'd graduate college, she says, to get that expectation into their vocabulary. Her seniors this year are the Class of 2024, and the schools they're applying to include MIT, Georgia Tech, Community College of Rhode Island, University of Chicago and American University. 

When she started working as program coordinator in 2017 after several years with NWBRV, the idea of college seemed farfetched to some of her students. "There wasn't a strong expectation of graduating from high school, much less going to college."

Now, she says, her students know they're going to college — the question is just "which one?"

That was the case for Elianny Herrera Montas, a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island pursuing a degree in psychology. Herrera has known Ofokansi since she was in seventh grade. She'd been thinking about community college until Ofokansi opened her up to the idea of the four-year school. "She helped me think of a bigger picture than I would have done by myself," Herrera says. 

A long weekend at Boston College, the first time she spent a lot of time seeing and talking to college students, had an impact on her, she adds. 

Herrera, whose brother attended some college in the Dominican Republic, is the first in her family to go to college in the United States. She won't be the last. Her younger sister, an 11th grader (Class of 2025) is now doing SAT prep with Ofokansi. 

What helped Herrera prepare for college the most? "I feel like everything helped the most," she says by phone from her dorm room, about an hour from home. She admits to getting homesick. But she makes it back regularly and her family comes to see her. She calls her mom almost daily. And Ofokansi has followed up with visits and care packages of highlighters, index cards and granola bars.

Ofokansi says one thing that really helps kids prepare for college is "just letting them know they can do it. College is your choice. It's not whether or not you can get into college; it's whether or not you want to."

Sometimes it also helps to see someone with a similar background who has made it. Ofokansi's family is from Nigeria, and many of her students are from West Africa, she says. Ofokansi was also a first-generation college student.

Ofokansi starts working with students in eighth grade as they prepare for high school. In ninth grade, the focus is on the students "learning who they are as students," so they can be more successful. Tenth graders explore careers and job and internship applications while eleventh graders focus on college visits and SATs. Seniors are in the thick of it, with applications and financial aid forms. Ofokansi works with them through all of it. 

"Every step is a learning opportunity," she says — even eating in the college dining halls during college visits. When students graduate from high school, they receive school supplies and bedding for their dorm rooms. "They all get something to start them off right," Ofokansi says. "That's always a challenge when you're dealing with students who come from a low-income background: making sure they're ready in every way possible."

Ofokansi says the most rewarding part for her is graduation, "to see them and their families celebrating. Some were the first in their family to go to high school, and now they're going to college."

Ofokansi has two pieces of advice to share with other college program mentors.

1. "It's never too early to start," she says. "I think a lot of programs start the college process the junior year. I'm working on lowering it to fifth grade. They are never too young to start thinking about and preparing for college."
2. "There's an option for everyone. I have students who are honor students and some who struggle academically. There's the perception that if I have a 1.8 GPA (grade point average), I can't go to college. That was the story for one of my students who was scared and had guidance counselors telling her she wouldn't be able to do it. But she went to a four-year college and made dean's list the first semester. College can be for everyone."

Her students are starting to think beyond college, too.

Herrera is still deciding on what to do after graduation: go to graduate school to become a psychologist, or go to a nurse practitioner program to become a nurse practitioner in psychology?

Either way, she says, "I'm not done yet."