(Left to right) Hector Garza, president of NCCEP; U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah D-Pa.; Rose Fabiszak, director of CollegeEd; and award winner Wanda Taylor from the Chicago GEAR UP Alliance.

Wanda Taylor, from the Chicago GEAR UP Alliance, was one of five parents in the
nation honored at this year’s NCCEP/GEAR UP Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. Taylor was recognized for her leadership and significant commitment to helping prepare students in her community for postsecondary education. This parental award program was established by the College Board as part of its ongoing commitment to equity and access for all students.

It’s no secret that parental involvement is critical to any child’s academic and social success; vast research supports this. But getting busy working parents to make the effort to carve out the time required can be challenging. CollegeEd® and the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships/GEAR UP are working hard to help parents understand the many ways they can be involved in their children’s education.

However, these organizations realize that their efforts can only succeed when parents from communities across the United States demonstrate significant commitment and leadership in collaboration with their local GEAR UP initiatives and school districts.  It is for this dedication that NCCEP/GEAR UP honored Taylor and four other outstanding parents — Maria León from the California State University-Los Angeles Project GEAR UP; Debra June Hill from the Nevada State GEAR UP; Raquel Gonzalez from the City University of New York Middle Grades Initiative/GEAR UP program; and Dianna Lee Sampson from the University of Washington GEAR UP project in Toppenish.

“We at the College Board are proud to once again sponsor this award,” said Rose Fabiszak, director of the CollegeEd program at the College Board, congratulating the honorees. “Our mission to connect students to college mirrors that of all the GEAR UP programs throughout the country that, in partnership with parents, work to ensure that all high school students graduate prepared to go to college and, ultimately, to be successful in college and their careers.”

GEAR UP is a school-college partnership supported by federal and local funding that helps prepare low-income and minority students for postsecondary education. Serving 1.5 million students nationwide, local GEAR UP sites provide a variety of services to students’ families, ranging from workshops on parenting, financial aid, college admissions, and state and local standards to building the capacity of parents to be true leaders in their community and advocates for their children and schools.

VP Fred Dietrich

The new school year begins with 32 free Fall Counselor Workshops that were designed to update school counselors on important program developments for the upcoming school year. In addition, hundreds of workshops on AP® and other College Board programs will be offered throughout the Midwest this year. To find a workshop near you, visit the Web site by
clicking here.

Forum 2008, which will be held Nov. 5-8 at the Hilton Americas in Houston, Texas, will feature more than 100 sessions exploring demographics, preparation and persistence, and many other topical issues. A preliminary program is available and registration discounts are offered throughout September and early October. For more details, please visit the Forum home page.

The Midwestern Regional Council and the 2009 Midwestern Regional Forum Program Planning Committee will hold their second planning meeting in late September. They have made great progress and are in the process of finalizing the program for the 2009 Midwestern Regional Forum, which will be held Feb. 8-10 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile. Juan Williams, senior correspondent for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” has been identified as a keynote speaker, and the committee will add seven more topical sessions. The planning committee is excited about their agenda and hopes to match or exceed the record-breaking registration and attendance of the 2008 Midwestern Regional Forum. More information will be available in late November.

Finally, I am delighted to announce that Dr. Ileana Rodriguez has accepted the position of Midwestern regional vice president. Ileana comes to the College Board from Triton College, near Chicago, where she was a member of the psychology faculty; the director of institutional research, assessment and curriculum; and the vice president of academic affairs and student services. With more than 15 years' experience in higher education, Ileana will offer bold leadership to the Midwestern Region's team and the College Board. You can learn more about Ileana in the October issue of Connection.

College Counseling Source Book 5th Edition

The “Sourcebook” provides education professionals with an overview of what they need to know about every dimension of college counseling, tips from experienced counselors and handouts for students.

Joyce Brown, high school counseling manager for CPS, is one of the people responsible for convincing district leadership to make the guide available in more than 100 high schools. “Since being introduced to the ‘Sourcebook’ during a National Office for School Counselor Advocacy district counselor director’s training, I have been actively using it and convincing others to use it as well,” Brown said. “It is full of information presented in a format that easily lends itself to use by all educators, including administrators, teachers and counselors.”

Greg Darnieder, director of postsecondary education and student development for CPS, said the district is focused on developing intentional strategies to support the development of a college-going culture within the school. “We are a large AVID district and we have eight EXCELerator™ schools, all of whom rely on the ‘Sourcebook’ for information,” he said. “Both teachers and counselors have access to easy-to-use information that supports the vision that all students understand that college is possible.”

CPS is one of the first school districts to train teachers to use the book when talking to students about college. “Training everyone in the school to understand the steps to college is an important first step to provide access and equity to every student seeking to fulfill their dreams of postsecondary education,” said Brown. “Implementing a college (counseling) class with the ‘Sourcebook’ as a reference guide would engage entire schools in distributing much-needed information to a broad range of students.” It is the school’s ultimate vision, Brown said, to offer a college counseling seminar for all CPS students.

Many of the teachers in attendance were introduced to the concept of Vertical Teams, which is based on the notion that all students can benefit from experiencing a rich and rigorous curriculum. In Vertical Teams, teachers from different grade levels, counselors and administrators work together to help students develop a continuum of knowledge and skills that build from one grade level to the next. Breakout sessions allowed participants to form content-specific groups to examine knowledge and skills within various disciplines and to explore how scaffolding content and skills helps prepare students for the next level of challenge.

Another group of participants were partners of the National Governors Association, who were already familiar with Vertical Teams. This group spent the entire first day of the conference learning how to meet the diverse learning needs of students without watering down the rigor of courses. Robyn Jackson, the president of Washington, D.C.,-based Core Educational Consulting, discussed how teachers can find opportunities to differentiate various AP curricula, quickly and easily determine students’ needs, and apply specific instructional strategies that are best suited to help each type of student meet the challenge of an AP course.

Working in Vertical Teams benefits students and teachers. One mathematics teacher from a rural partner school described how they used Vertical Teams to help students achieve better scores in the AP mathematics tests. She said that she and her colleagues were stunned to learn that the middle school math curriculum introduced slope in seventh grade. But teaching this in seventh grade means that those students are prepared to delve deeper into statistics when they get to high school. The science Vertical Team at another rural partner school literally created an additional quarter of learning for students by finding enough overlaps in the scope and sequence of their curriculum to allow their middle school teacher to teach anatomy for the first time.

Summer Splash is sponsored by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and partners with financial support from a $500,000 NGA grant. WDPI partners include the Office of the Governor, the College Board, Cooperative Educational Service agencies 3 and 4, the Wisconsin Academy Staff Development Initiative, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center on Education and Work, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and nine Wisconsin school districts.

For more information on WDPI initiatives related to Advanced Placement, click here.

As of the July 1 deadline, the CollegeKeys Compact™ had 475 institutions on the final roll of charter members for this important initiative. This number includes 137 colleges, 311 schools, 18 non-profits and nine agencies. Sixty-three of the charter institutions are from the Midwestern Region. The number continues to grow and, currently, there are 492 institutions that have signed the Compact.


Click here to see entire list.

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Click here to see events and workshops in the Midwestern region.