Allan Appel Photo
Sixth-graders Rachel Young and Mary Linton want to go to Yale one day. With a boost from a new “Pathway To Promise” campaign, they and students across New Haven spent part of the school day strategizing with their teachers about how to get there, as a seven-letter word became an official focus of the city school curriculum.
Rachel and Mary (pictured) both want to study nursing at Yale. Rachel wants to be a nurse in a foreign country.
How can you help yourself? their principal at Davis Street School, Lola Nathan, asked them Tuesday morning.
By taking Spanish and Mandarin, the languages taught at Davis, they said.
What else can we do to help you? she asked.
More field trips, said Rachel.
We’ll do it, said Nathan.
The classroom talk at Davis Tuesday morning — and in public schools all over town — was about college. Why to go. And how to get there.
The occasion was “College Day,” the launch of a new effort called “Pathway to Promise.” It brings the New Haven Promise program, guaranteed Yale- and Community Foundation-backed college scholarships for successful high-schoolers, down to the grade-school level, in the hope that a college-going “culture” develops early among students and their families.
The day began with Superintendent Reggie Mayo and other officials in a live video stream telling the kids how they made their career decisions.
The stream was beamed to city classrooms, where kids and teachers watched, then held their own conversations.
In candid biographical remarks, Mayo said he had fallen into gambling when he was back in school. He hung out with a wrong crowd and had to choose between “finishing high school and going to jail.” A high school guidance counselor influenced him to go to college. (He proudly wore his Virginia Union University T‑shirt. Mayo ended up teaching science in the New Haven public schools, eventually becoming the system’s superintendent. (Click here to read Mayo’s full remarks.)
When the TV went off, conversation began in Shannon McNally’s spiffy new science room at Davis, complete, she said, with enough microscopes and triple beam balances for each kid.
The first-year Teach for America instructor proudly wore her Central Michigan University shirt as she listened to Nijae Flowers describe her goal: to go to Penn State for undergrad biochemistry and then Harvard for graduate school to learn to cure breast cancer.
If she’s successful, Nijae will be the first in her family to go to college.
“Rachel will be too,” said Principal Nathan,who said knowing each kid’s family well is the sine qua non to getting the college conversation started early.
In some families where college-going is not part of the tradition, complacency needs to be overcome. “We have to raise mom too,” Nathan put it. In many instances the kids become the emissaries of the college dreams and help their parents catch fire.
Rhianna Bennett (left) said her parents always stressed attending college. Having gone to “girl science” classes and summer programs at Yale, she is eager to apply to there to study architecture. Her friend N’ya Clarke said she intends to go to Columbia to study both art and law.
“I want to go into politics. I want to fix things, and Barack Obama went there [Columbia],“she said.
“Even the well motivated kids, you got to keep them moving” from an early age, Nathan said. “I can’t have slippers, academically.”
Davis’ halls are festooned with college colors. The classrooms display the teachers’ degrees. NHPS Director of Instruction Demaris Rau (Columbia Teachers College) said the next steps of the Pathways to Promise program will be for each school to determine a “College Day” to mark each month.
Those days will feature special programs including, for example, college visits. A district-wide committee will coordinate efforts. “We have kids who want to be doctors but hate science,” Rau noted. “We want to help them before it’s too late in school to make real choices to reach real goals.”
She said not everyone can be a football player, a common aspiration of middle-school boys. “A big part of Pathway to Promise is to help kids figure out what they’re good at.”
According to the press release, the New Haven Public Schools are among the first districts in the nation to have a college-going component incorporated in the K‑12 ongoing curriculum.
Seventh-grader Jerry White has already conquered the sports delusion.
His teacher, Deana Spinelli, told the class how she went on a college tour of UConn because her dad, a Husky fanatic, encouraged her to attend. She cried on the tour; she wanted to go to a smaller school. After touring larger schools, she fell in love with Marist College, a smaller campus on the Hudson River. She enrolled there, and it was a good fit.
“I want to go to a big spread-out college,” Jerry said. His goal: to research U.S. history there.
“You have to think about your own personality,” Spinelli said. “Jerry can handle it.”