Y Monthly Monday Mission Update – Y Community Schools and the Next Generation Scholars Program
In order to fulfill the Y’s mission and achieve our strategy of building equitable, healthy and connected communities, we must actively seek out innovative ways to have deep impact in communities that been historically neglected. Our two best strategies for doing so are our Head Start early childhood programs for young children and their families, and our Community School work for school-aged children and youth and their families. Community Schools are not a program; they are a strategy designed to use neighborhood schools in under-resourced communities as hubs of resources and community for youth and their families.
The graphic below depicts how Community Schools are designed to operate in Baltimore City (where we are responsible for 27 of them). We also play a strategic role in all 56 Community Schools in Baltimore County and the four new ones in Howard County.
While the tie that binds them all is a high quality, outcomes based approach which includes academic intervention as well as robust enrichment components, each school community ultimately determines what programmatic elements make the most sense for them.
A critically important program found in most of our Community School high schools is called Next Generation Scholars (NGS), which is a college access program funded by the state that supports low-income students in accessing postsecondary educational opportunities. NGS programs provide a cohort-based model of support, mentoring, and college guidance for first generation students. The Y runs one of the largest collection of NGS programs in Maryland.
One such NGS program is at Y Community School Reginald F. Lewis High School in northeast Baltimore City.
Two of that school’s NGS program participants, eleventh graders Saniya Slaughter and Marcus Leake, along with Y Program Manager Kevin Salter, were recently interviewed by WBAL News Radio host Jayne Miller. Opening the conversation with the observation that "we often talk about young people, but rarely talk to them," Miller’s interview is fascinating.
Follow this link if you’d like to watch the full 16-minute conversation. If you don’t have that kind of time, follow this link to watch a four-minute edited version. Either way, you’ll be glad you did.
Many thanks to all those who help make this stellar program a door of opportunity for the many bright and talented young people in our community who are too often thought of as simply problems rather than the incredibly important keys to our community’s future that they actually are.
Saniya and Marcus, in their understated way, underscore that point emphatically.
All the best,
John K. Hoey
President & CEO
The Y in Central Maryland