Working-Class Kids Help Working-Class Kids To Ignite Dreams

It is an all-too-familiar story.

Especially in small towns, such as Wilmington, Ohio, where tough times have made too many national headlines.

The boy was a senior in high school, and his parents never had gone to college and had no idea how to get him there. One morning at church, he turned to a woman who knew a thing or two about how to get educated.

"I want to go to college," he told her. "What do I need to do?"

His lack of preparation broke the woman's heart. He had not taken a single college entrance exam, nor had he enrolled in any college prep classes in his four years of high school. When she told then-Wilmington school board member Chris Burns-DiBiasio about the boy, something clicked.

"The time to prepare for college is not in your last two years of high school," Burns-DiBiasio said. "It's in middle school, when you're deciding on which classes to take in high school. If you don't have parents who know how to help do that, then you need somebody else who will."

In President Barack Obama's first speech to a joint session of Congress last month, he vowed that America will have the highest number of college graduates in the world by 2020. His plan is that every student attend at least some postsecondary education. It's quite a goal, one that promises to level the field for so many of America's children. But there's a lot of soil to till before that ambition can take root.

Wilmington is doing its part to tend the garden. Burns-DiBiasio is also the wife of Wilmington College's president, Dan DiBiasio. She said her dual public role gave her the leverage to convene local educators, school administrators and community activists to brainstorm how to help middle-school students whose family circumstances made them unlikely candidates for college. So that's exactly what she did.

They looked at programs springing up across the country, drew up plans for their own and called it the College Club. In 2007, the program reached 15 middle-school students identified as disadvantaged but full of promise.

Tony Staubach, a 23-year-old AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and Wilmington College graduate, runs the program. Various community professionals volunteer as mentors, but the staff is primarily Wilmington College students who are the first in their families to go to college.

"I grew up lucky," Staubach said. "My parents were college-educated, and I didn't see how much help they gave me until I got to Wilmington. Nearly half the students here are the first in their families to go. I got to see how much harder it is for a lot of them and felt a lot of gratitude for how my parents prepared me. They already spoke the jargon."

By jargon, he means terms such as "FAFSA," which stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, "credit hours" and "majors." Mysterious language to working-class kids.

"Most of the kids have no idea what we're talking about at first," Staubach said. "We help them understand what happens when you go to college. We ask them what kind of jobs they'd like, too, and then advise them on what sort of college degree would help them get there."

Burns-DiBiasio said such one-on-one coaching is crucial for working-class kids, who often give up on college by the time they get to middle school.

"They come from families that either say, 'We can't afford it' or 'That isn't what this family does.' Or someone has already told them they aren't good enough for college."

And nothing beats having people with similar backgrounds telling them they're better than they know.

They meet college students who are on financial aid and not afraid to admit it. Who tell them they, too, never had heard of a "residence hall." Who assure them they were a lot like them only a few short years ago.

"They stand up in front of these kids and say, 'Hey, I didn't think I could go to college, and look what I did,'" Burns-DiBiasio said.

And then they add the magic to the message:

"You can do this, too."

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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