Illustration by Pushart
She was born in prison. Her grandmother came to get her, and with an uncle, raised her. She was in college now, with a 3.5 GPA and a busy social life. She loved school. She was a junior, getting ready for graduation…
Then her uncle died. He was, essentially, her dad. She’d suffered plenty of adversity in her short life, but never a loss so deep; she didn’t know how to process it. So she withdrew in the middle of the semester.
That is when College Bound St. Louis (collegeboundstl.org), the organization that had helped her navigate the often byzantine path to college, stepped in to help.
“We ensured that instead of getting all F’s for that semester, she could get incompletes,” says executive director Scott Baier. “She had a debt of a few thousand dollars, because she’d dropped out in the middle and didn’t know what to do. Our coaches and our staff members called the university, and we got the debt to essentially go from $6,000 to $1,000 to $300. Because for her, it might as well have been $60,000.” Baier uses this story to illustrate how College Bound manages to provide structure for the students it works with, yet stay nimble enough to respond to each student’s circumstances.
Founded in 2006, College Bound works with under-resourced kids, often the first in their families to contemplate attending college. Beginning in ninth grade, the program follows them until they have a college diploma. The year-round programming covers academics and test prep, but also counseling, self-advocacy skills, and even field trips to campuses to help kids know what to expect from college life. College Bound’s success rate is nearly 100 percent, with 60 to 75 percent finishing college within six years, the same rate as students in the highest income brackets. The program currently has about 650 kids and brings on about 65 more students annually. Some of its earliest graduates have returned through AmeriCorps, working with new generations of students.
“Our goal is for them to live lives filled with positive choice and opportunity,” Baier says. “We need to have more of these people leading companies, holding elected office, and advocating for their communities as leaders. That is what is going to change the situation, where it is no longer an exception to the rule in their neighborhood or their family to be the one kid to go to college and get a degree.”
