Notre Dame receives $1.3M grant

Notre Dame College in South Euclid recently received the TRIO Student Support Services Grant to fund a new project designed to provide academic and career-focused support services to at-risk students.

The SSS Grant is a federal grant that will distribute over $1.3 million total over five years. Falcons’ Academic and Career Success, otherwise known as Project FACS, will provide a range of services for qualifying students, including tutoring, study skills development, and academic and personal advising.

According to Notre Dame President Dr. Michael Pressimone, the program will assist 140 students each year who are first-generation college students, from a low socioeconomic background or minority students.

Pressimone said the demographics of Notre Dame made the school a good candidate to apply for the grant.

“The reason that we felt we were ideal to make the application is because it’s a very heavy focus on firstgeneration low economic status students, and that’s a significant part of the student population that we educate here,” Pressimone said. “We’re on average 50 percent or more first generation students.”

The grant funds will allow Notre Dame to hire additional staff who are solely involved with the students in Project FACS, with specialized focus areas including career preparation or academic assistance, Pres

simone said.

He explained that the program can be tailored to the needs of individual students.

“For instance, you could have a student who comes in, and just because someone happens to come from a loweconomic area or is first-generation doesn’t mean they’re not academically able,” Pressimone said. “They may not need academic wraparound services. They may need kind of career-focused services. How can we get (them) into the right field and to the right career, (and) provide the assessment that we need to do that.”

Pressimone said Notre Dame already has student support services available, but he wanted to see a higher rate of graduation success in

first-generation and low economic status students. He said the grant and Project FACS will set targets to help the students better navigate to graduation.

“The SSS grant specifically helps us get students from the beginning to the end, and it sets benchmarks for ‘here’s where you are, and here’s where we’d like you to be,’” he said. “And so there are actual targets in the grant that we are shooting for so that we can guarantee more student success. Because you know, it’s one thing to get a student to enroll, it’s another thing to get a student to complete. And this is really all about increasing our graduation rate, and increasing retention year over year, particularly for the most vulnerable students.”