'Humans of New York' blog raises $1M for students facing hurdles to college

The 'Humans of New York' fundraising will enable a principal to take her sixth-graders out of their high-crime neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit Harvard.

|
Kathy Willens/AP
Street portrait photographer Brandon Stanton, creator of the popular Humans of New York blog, near Union Square in New York, Oct. 2, 2013. A fundraising campaign inspired by the popular photo blog has raised more than $1 million to send middle-school students from a high-poverty Brooklyn school on field trips to Harvard.

When it comes to preparing students for college – and even helping them aspire to it – there’s a chasm between the haves and have-nots.

The need to bridge that divide was highlighted this week in two ways.

One is the story of an online crowdsourcing effort that will enable a principal in Brooklyn, N.Y., to fulfill her dream of taking sixth-graders out of their high-crime neighborhood to visit Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. – to show them “they can go anywhere, and that they will belong.”

The other was a formal event at the White House Friday afternoon, in which first lady Michelle Obama honored the National School Counselor of the Year and highlighted school counseling as part of her Reach Higher initiative to inspire more students to pursue postsecondary education.

“Schools have not historically been accountable or given resources to support students’ postsecondary aspirations and plans,” says Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Public school counselors are responsible for supporting students in the areas of academics, social and emotional needs, and college/career readiness. They have an average caseload of 471 students, nearly double the recommended 250.

One out of 5 high schools “operates without a school counselor at all,” said John King, a senior adviser at the US Department of Education, during a press call with reporters Thursday.

Modest gains have been made in providing students with more support, through nonprofit groups and some school district initiatives, Ms. Savitz-Romer says, but “there’s still a large percentage of students we have not engaged in planning for their future.”

Primarily, she says, these are students who would be the first generation in their families to attend college, and often they decide early on that college isn’t for them. So they don’t get on the path that would lead them there.

That disengagement is what Principal Nadia Lopez is hoping to avoid for her students at Mott Hall Bridges Academy in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

Photographer Brandon Stanton got to know her after posting a photo and quote of a student named Vidal on the blog "Humans of New York." When Mr. Stanton heard about Ms. Lopez’s hopes to expose students to Harvard, he started an online fundraiser. The original goal was $100,000, but about a week into it, donations passed the $1 million mark, and Stanton announced that everything above $700,000 would go toward a scholarship fund for graduates of the school.

The donations show that people realize “this is a civil rights issue, and to make sure that students have access to higher education means we’re going to be a better society,” Savitz-Romer says.

But instead of kids having to rely on happenstance or a particularly inspiring leader, she says, “we have to find a way to get it equitable across schools.”

That’s why Mrs. Obama and the White House have been challenging universities, school districts, and nonprofits to boost school counseling resources and offer better training to help counselors reach the students who most need their help. Related gatherings last summer and fall attracted hundreds of people interested in working on this cause.

“Often America’s school counselors are truly the deciding factor in whether our young people attend college or not,” Obama said at the White House gathering Friday. It’s about time, she said, to start “giving our school counselors the support and recognition they deserve. And not just with words, but with meaningful action, with resources.”

In the past year, various groups have stepped up to invest tens of millions of dollars in such efforts, Obama said. And the Education Department has also offered millions of dollars in grants to districts and schools to boost their counseling programs.

For the first time, school counselors were honored at the White House just as national teachers have long been honored. Obama, flanked by semifinalists and finalists, congratulated Cory Notestine, a school counselor at Alamosa High School in Colorado, who won this year’s award from the American School Counselor Association.

“Each of us here today aims to foster an educational environment free of barriers, where students can set their goals as high as they can dream,” Mr. Notestine said. “There simply are not enough of us.... But school counselors ... do not allow this to stop our efforts to reach every single student.”

“He takes the time to relate to each of his students on a personal level. I have seen several students’ lives changed because of him,” a fellow counselor said of him in a press release. Others credited him with leading a cultural shift in the counseling department during his first year at the school.

School counselors said in a 2012 survey that college access was the area in which they needed the most training, Education Week reports. Many degrees in counseling do not require course work specifically in college counseling, but that’s starting to change as higher-education institutions make reforms, Savitz-Romer says.

One example of a nonprofit doing encouraging work in this area is the College Advising Corps in Chapel Hill, N.C. Advisers, many of them first-generation college graduates, spend two years working with counselors in high-needs schools to help improve the rate of underrepresented students who apply for and attend college. Students who meet with these advisers have been found to be 23 percent more likely than those who don’t to apply to college and submit the paperwork for financial aid.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to  'Humans of New York' blog raises $1M for students facing hurdles to college
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2015/0130/Humans-of-New-York-blog-raises-1M-for-students-facing-hurdles-to-college
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe