New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Grant helps with college preparation
GEAR UP provides tutoring, scholarships and other services to students
Victor Sosa has known since he was in eighth grade that he planned to attend Manchester Community College.
The 19yearold was one of the first East Hartford students to participate in GEAR UP, which provides tutoring, mentoring, scholarships and other support for middle and high school students.
Sosa, who joined the program as a seventhgrader when it first launched, credits GEAR UP for his “whole entire life.” Through the program, he got help with his homework, guidance on writing a resume and interviewing that landed him a fulltime job at Pratt & Whitney, and the support through community college now.
Hundreds of students will get the same support over the next seven years through a nearly $26 million federal grant to continue a GEAR UP partnership between Manchester Community College and East Hartford Public Schools. Programs will also be started at Middlesex Community College and Meriden Public Schools and Naugatuck Valley Community College and Waterbury Public Schools.
Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system president Mark Ojakian announced the funding, which will be provided over the next seven years “to significantly increase the number of lowincome students prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.”
“We should not talk about it as funding, we should not talk about it as money, we should not talk about it as federal funds or taxpayers’ dollars. It’s an investment,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said. “It’s an investment in our future.”
Nathan Quesnel was a middle school principal in East Hartford in 2012 when he was called into a meeting about the first GEAR UP grant.
“We were going to bring them on campuses, we were going to connect them to tutoring, we were going to show them things they hadn’t seen,” he said. “I think I walked out of the meeting saying, that sounded too good to be true.” Now the superintendent for the district, he called the second grant “a Christmas present come early.”
“It’s about making sure folks are ready for the 21st century, making sure you have the skills you need to succeed going forward,“Gov. Ned Lamont said. He highlighted the role of the grant in providing in social supports and mentoring, which he said is the most common need he hears from teachers around the state.
Connecticut needs a trained and educated workforce, he said, which GEAR UP can help provide. “We need you. We need each and every young person,” Lamont said.
Joanna White, who directed the first GEAR UP grant at East Hartford and helped write the current grant, said the second iteration benefits from the lessons learned over the last seven years. They’ve added supports for students’ first year of college, a time when they can sometimes get to campus and “feel so lost,” she said.
The supports will include access to dual enrollment college classes while still in high school and a firstyear experience class that helps familiarize students with registration, financial aid and navigating the transition to higher education.
“Every day is different,” she said of the program. “It’s not just about pointing them in the right directions towards college or career options. Sometimes it’s things like making sure their family has food. Sometimes it’s making sure that they pass their exam the next day. You can’t build this, you can’t build a Victor, without everything going back.”
About a quarter of the students from the first cohort have gone on to Manchester Community College, White said. Others are at the University of Connecticut, Yale and other colleges and jobs around the state and around the country, she said.
Sosa chose to start at Manchester to save money before transferring to a fouryear school, a path White helped him pursue, he said. He plans to transfer to Central Connecticut State University to earn a bachelor’s degree, and hopes to attend law school.
GEAR UP helped him academically and personally, he said, supporting him as he went through school, as he coped with his brother’s death and as he pursued his job and higher education. He got his manufacturing job, working on F35 fighter jet engine blades, through GEAR UP and the United Way Manufacturing Pipeline.
Sosa’s grueling schedule starts with working the third shift, overnight, then going to classes in the morning. “With me working this new job, that GEAR UP helped me get, I bought my mom a house,” he said. “She has an income, I have an income, we can both put together a house.
“Everything who I am is from them. People ask me all the time, why do you work so hard? Why do you go to school fulltime, why do you work full time? And I look at it like this: people invested their time into me, so it’s time to repay these people on their investment.”