For students, a bridge to success
Program's path starts in 6th grade
The summer before sixth grade, Denise Ghartey walked apprehensively into the John M. Tobin school cafeteria.
It was her first day at Summerbridge Cambridge, a tuition-free initiative that provides a select group of city middle-schoolers with intensive summer school and year-round academic support.
Seven years later, Ghartey will graduate this spring from Cambridge Rindge & Latin School as president of the student body, captain of the girls' varsity soccer team, and the recipient of a full, four-year scholarship to Hamilton College in upstate New York.
Summerbridge Cambridge "taught me how to work as part of a group, be successful and believe in myself," she told an audience during the program's winter fund-raiser last month. "I wouldn't be where I am today without SBC."
The program, a spirited cross between a tutoring program and summer camp, has accrued an impressive list of feats in the 16 years since its inception. With 100 participants every year, mostly students from low-income families, more than 90 percent of its graduates who finished high school in 2006 and 2007 went on to four-year colleges.
Last year, two of its alumni received full scholarships through the Posse Foundation to competitive private universities. This year, the number increased to three: a Bucknell-bound first-generation college student whose parents moved to Cambridge from Eritrea; another, headed for Bryn Mawr, whose parents emigrated from Haiti; and Ghartey.
"Summerbridge is a bit of a misnomer, because we do programming all year round," said Laurie Rothstein, its director of development. "All our students make a two-year commitment: They start in the summer before sixth grade with the six-week program, and continue once a week in sixth and seventh grades during the academic year."
The commitment is not one to be taken lightly. Students attend classes at Kennedy-Longfellow from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and take away an additional two hours of homework from Monday to Thursday. Summerbridge's director, Sarah Joslyn, who gives a presentation about the program to every fifth-grade class in the city, said she often highlights the homework and the two-year commitment in her talk.
"In our presentation, we have a skit about homework, and at the end of the presentation, invariably, someone will say, 'You get homework?!' " she said. "But, the students also get their teachers' cellphone numbers so that if they need help with their homework at home, they really do just frequently call their teachers to get help."
This accessibility is a direct result of the profiles of the teachers - recruited from a pool of more than 200 applicants from around the country each year. The 20 individuals chosen are either college or high school students who make up for a lack of experience in education with seemingly boundless reserves of energy, and a desire to connect with their students because of the proximity in age.
"Teachers at my school weren't fun like them," said 14-year-old Francisca Pepin, who entered the SBC program out of fifth grade four years ago. "They're like friends and teachers: friends in a way that you can come to them for anything, but teachers like if you did something wrong, they would buckle down. They're fun and outgoing and make you want to learn."
The range of courses offered at SBC reflects a faculty with a desire to experiment. Teacher-driven electives last year included a legal class based on the "Law and Order" television series; a history unit on the Western frontier that involved a live recreation of the 1980s educational computer game "Oregon Trail" - complete with other teachers masquerading as buffalo; and a comparative religions class in which students posted their top 10 complaints about SBC on the main office door, to capture how Martin Luther felt when he nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany.
"As soon as the kids got out of class, they all ran into the office, and they were like, 'We don't mean it. We're so sorry,' " Joslyn said, recalling the aftermath of the posting. "But the whole point of the exercise was to show them how scary and how dangerous it is to speak up against an authority figure.
"They really got it, and they were really horrified."
The program, which had expenses of about $385,000 in the fiscal year ending last June, gets most of its funding from foundation grants and private donations. Since 2006, SBC has tried to stay in touch with its students after they complete the initial two-year program, to assist students as they enter high school and begin to evaluate their options for college.
"A big goal of mine is to really support every student who is in danger of falling through the cracks, either academically or through issues in their personal and family lives," said Dave Lewis, program and alumni coordinator, who runs SBC's after-school program and student center based at Cambridge Rindge & Latin.
Besides organizing a basketball league, monthly dances, and a Facebook group, Lewis also works with a counselor to advise students on the college and financial-aid application process.
The 15 seniors he helped with their applications this year will likely hear back from colleges within the next couple of weeks, Lewis said.
While they wait in what Lewis calls "limbo period," the students' best source of reassurance may be that, by deciding to take part in SBC seven years ago, they tapped into one of the best available avenues to scholastic success.
"Right now, there's a lot of anxiety about where everybody's going to go, but I'm pretty confident that the students we worked with submitted the best applications they could," he added. "I'm looking forward to hearing good news, and I think students feel the same way."
