The Goucher College-Choice Middle Schools Program Partnership

Abstract

The Choice Middle Schools is a community-based intervention for middle school students at risk of school drop out. The Shriver Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County provides administrative oversight to the program. Choice Middle Schools is funded by the Maryland State Department of Education and is part of the Maryland’s Tomorrow Middle School Initiative. The goals of the program are as follows:

• To improve school attendance

• To decrease disciplinary referrals

• To decrease out of school suspensions

• To improve grade point average in core subjects

Commencement was still two weeks away as the president, dressed in full academic regalia, headed across the Goucher campus for another commencement ceremony. Processing to “Pomp and Circumstance,” ten eighth graders were graduating from the Choice Middle Schools Program, and the college wanted to honor the moment. The ceremony, a mixture of formality and high jinx, marked the end of the students’ participation in the Goucher component of their program—a program of tutoring, recreation, and mentoring for high risk adolescents from two middle schools in a low income area of Baltimore County. Every week during the academic year they had traveled to the idyllic suburban campus to work—and play—with Goucher student volunteers. Many of these adolescents had never ventured very far beyond their neighborhoods before entering the Choice Middle Schools Program. The college might as well have been on Mars. One of the goals, therefore, of the program had been to make a college campus as familiar and inviting to them as their local school yard.

“I expect several of you,” the president told the graduates, “to return as entering freshmen at Goucher four years from now.” As each student came forward to receive a certificate or card and a Goucher Alumni t-shirt from his or her tutor, applause and cheers erupted from the assembled group of Goucher volunteers and Choice Middle Schools and Goucher professional staff. Not by accident was this afternoon laced with the symbolism of a college graduation. The message was clear: Those at-risk students had stuck with an after-school program for three years and the college had faith in them and their futures. Another message underlay the event as well: Diverse constituencies could work together in an effective partnership.