One of the highlights for me at this year’s regional forums was the opportunity to present the CollegeKeys Compact™ Innovation Awards. This new $5,000 award was given to three outstanding programs in each of the College Board’s six regions. The winners were recognized for innovative best practices that help low-income students get ready for, get in to and get through college. These outstanding programs will serve as models so that others, by adopting their successful strategies, will be able to help more students successfully pursue a college education. You can read about all of the winners as well as highlights from the regional forums in this issue of Connection.

Regional forums are a wonderful opportunity for me to visit with educators and hear about the challenges and issues that are unique to their geographical region, and others that are universal for educators across the country and around the world. I want to extend my thanks for the wonderful hospitality I received at the two events I attended this year in the Southern and Western Regions. I was scheduled to take part in our Middle States Regional Forum, but we had to cancel the event because of two major snowstorms. I was not surprised to hear that the Middle States Regional Council and our staff in the Middle States are hard at working turning this unfortunate turn of events into a new and exciting opportunity. The next Middle States Regional Forum will take place Oct. 27 at the Washington Hilton in conjunction with Forum 2010 — a first-time collaboration of its kind for the College Board.

I was truly inspired by hearing our keynote speaker, Deborah Jewell-Sherman, senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former superintendent of Richmond (Va.) Public Schools, talk about the remarkable success she achieved in turning around some of Richmond’s most impoverished and low-performing schools. She argued that all too often demography is destiny for our students, and that especially for students in the urban core, socioeconomic factors lead to academic destinies unworthy of them and unworthy of us as educators and as a nation.

She said: “Only those of us who are willing to see the invisible are able to do the impossible. That’s what we’re challenged to do on a daily basis — change reality for all too many of our children.” I can think of no better rallying call for our College Board members and the many other educators with whom we are working to make college success a reality for all students.

Gaston