By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
It’s a back-to-school essay cliché: How I Spent My Summer Vacation. But for some College Achieve Public School (CAPS) students, this summer was anything but cliché.
More than 120 rising ninth to 12th graders got to experience something many of their contemporaries take for granted – a college program on a college campus.
These students slept in dorm rooms, ate in dining halls, participated in classes and met different people as part of the school’s new Summer of a Lifetime (SOAL) program. The goal of SOAL is to expose the students, many of whom had never set foot on a college campus or even traveled outside their communities, to activities outside their daily norm.
CAPS is a kindergarten through 12th-grade public charter school network that serves predominantly low-income and students of color in Asbury Park, Neptune, Paterson, Plainfield and North Plainfield. Its mission is to prepare all students to excel in and graduate from the top colleges and universities in the nation.
“As lifelong educators in communities with high poverty, we’ve always seen bright students who excelled in high school, got into top universities, and struggled to fit in or even dropped out their first year because they felt uncomfortable and out of place. We had to change that,” said Michael Piscal, CEO and founder of CAPS.
Students spent between one and three weeks at either Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Princeton University in Princeton, American University in Washington, D.C., Colby College in Maine or Oxford University in Oxford, England. School administrators hope SOAL, and other programs like it, will become a critical part of the school’s mission and curriculum, and go a long way to helping develop well-rounded students who are ready for college.
In addition to the classes and activities on campus, the students visited cultural sites like Stonehenge and Windsor Castle in England and the White House, U.S. Capitol Building and Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The programs were free for the students, paid for by a combination of private and philanthropic sources.
“We’re giving the kids a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with an experience they would never have had at this juncture in their young lives,” explained Jodi McInerney, COO and executive director of CAPS Asbury Park. “I’ve already seen such growth in their independence after just a few short days of travel. The lessons they’re learning about themselves – and how to navigate the world in a safe way that allows them to explore – are priceless.”
Matthew Crystian, a rising freshman at CAPS Asbury Park, has known for a while he wants to be a mechanical engineer. But, he said, his experience at Oxford has “broadened the spectrum” for him. “I haven’t completely made a decision about the type of engineering career that I would like to pursue, but this experience has truly opened my eyes to the many possibilities,” Matthew said.
In addition to learning about engineering careers, Matthew also met new people, tried new foods and explored an area far different from his hometown.
“My favorite part of the trip was bonding with the other students and meeting people from different cultures with similar interests,” he said.
While Matthew said he wasn’t “adventurous enough to eat anything that I wouldn’t eat in America,” he did take a strong liking to the very British tradition of afternoon tea. He enjoyed the sandwiches, scones and other desserts – and especially embraced the tea. “I can honestly say that I drank hot tea every day I was there,” Matthew said.
He also said he picked up some British slang during his time in England. “They used the word ‘mate’ a lot. While I was there, my friends and I would refer to each other as ‘mate,’ ” but, sadly, the habit didn’t last. “When we returned to the U.S. we quickly reverted back to our old ways,” he said.
What will last are the memories. “I left the U.S. only knowing one person and I returned from the trip with multiple lifelong friends.”
“Filling that social capital gap for our students is one of our main goals at College Achieve,” said Piscal, which is why the school has numerous other activities for students throughout the school year, like internship and summer job opportunities, ski trips and creative excursions to see shows at local theaters.
“These are all activities that are not part of their daily lives but the exposure will help them feel less like outsiders and more like they belong everywhere that their hard work and abilities take them in life,” Piscal said.
According to a 2021 article from The Hechinger Report, “Nationally, white students at public colleges are two and a half times more likely to graduate than Black students, and 60 percent more likely to graduate than Latino students.” Studies show that intangibles – travel, cultural and life experiences – can help students feel more comfortable on college campuses and therefore more likely to graduate.
“There are so many students for whom college is not a given, who don’t have family members and friends telling them stories about their time in college. When they eat at the dining hall, sit in college classrooms, attend classes taught by professors and just spend the day on a university campus, we’re showing them that they belong at these schools, that it is possible for them to get into the best colleges in the nation and that they can be successful,” said Brian Taylor, founder of the CAPS SOAL program at Princeton. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that for many of our College Achieve scholars, these few weeks are going to change their lives and mold their hopes for the future they want to build.”
State testing data shows the CAPS method is working. CAPS schools outperform other public schools in their area. Most recently, CAPS students excelled on the Start Strong state testing that measured learning loss after the pandemic. The results from all the College Achieve schools showed students needed significantly less support than their peers in neighboring schools in math and English.
Liana Whyte, also a rising freshman at CAPS Asbury Park, attended the Princeton program this summer. She said it “impacted the way I think about my future. It changed how I think about college.”
She said now she “can’t wait” to explore collegiate possibilities and opportunities. “It really opened my eyes to what’s out there.”
The inaugural programs were so successful, CAPS plans to expand the SOAL program in 2023, hoping to eventually send every high school student to a summer program experience.
“I was living the life of a college student, eating the food there, walking around, taking classes, everything like a college student would,” said Rubi Lopez, a CAPS Asbury Park student who attended the Colby College program. “I really, truly enjoyed my experience and I was able to see what living as a college student would be like.”
Gemar Mills, chief academic officer and executive director of CAPS Paterson knows how important that feeling is. “Being able to envision yourself at a top university is a critical first step to believing you can be successful there, that you belong there.”
This article originally appeared in the Back to School section of the Aug. 18 – 24, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.
