When Grace Graham first heard about the Hartford Promise, she thought it sounded "a bit too good to be true."
The Bulkeley High School senior was in 11th grade at the time and already stressed out over future tuition payments. Her mother, a nurse, had warned Graham that any money for college had to come from scholarships or a "full ride."
Then Principal Gayle Allen-Greene mentioned the district's "promise" at a school assembly: Starting with the Class of 2016 — Graham's class — Hartford students who live in the city, have high attendance and a minimum B average could get up to $20,000 over four years to help pay for college.
"That's a lot of money and the requirements fit me exactly," said Graham, 17, who is interested in filmmaking. She initially figured it was a "scam."
But the pledge is real, and after a flurry of fundraising and a low-profile launch a few years ago, Hartford Promise advocates have begun to ramp up the publicity, talking to school counselors and families about a scholarship program they believe can change lives in a poor city where every dollar counts.
So far, about 140 to 160 Hartford seniors are on track to become the first Promise scholars, said Richard Sugarman, the program's executive director. That's about 15 percent of seniors who are city residents.
Allen-Greene has seen college dreams derailed over a few hundred dollars — the deposit needed to reserve a dorm room before freshman year begins.
"They got full financial aid and scholarships, but parents didn't have the money to hold the room," Allen-Greene said. "So that's how important the Hartford Promise is."
In 2012, when former schools Superintendent Christina Kishimoto unveiled a $12 million capital campaign to help Hartford students pay for college — a large-scale scholarship fund modeled after Promise programs in New Haven and Kalamazoo, Mich. — she called it "an absolute priority."
It wasn't just the potential economic impact, although Promise advocates have noted the aging professional workforce and the need for more college-educated prospects from the city.
Educators saw the Hartford Promise as an incentive for students to come to school every day, to rise from the quagmire of poverty and trauma in their neighborhoods and to raise any Ds or Cs to at least Bs on their report cards.
"We need to motivate our students, and our students need to know the whole community is behind them," Kishimoto said alongside several of the Hartford Promise Champions, a group that includes corporate leaders, the city mayor and education officials who have committed to raising the millions to support scholarships through the class of 2023.
The "promise" is $5,000 a year toward attending an accredited four-year college, or $2,500 annually to students at a two-year community college. It is not connected to the city's federal Promise Zone designation to spur a socio-economic turnaround in north Hartford.
Hartford Promise founders have said they factored in average federal Pell Grant awards and college aid packages when putting an amount to the "last dollar" scholarship, figuring $5,000 a year could be enough to fill the financial gap that has proved too much for impoverished families who lack the savings or credit to take out a loan.
"You go to school, we say, 'If you do well, this is what happens,' and then you get accepted and you have the conversation with your parents, realistic conversations," Allen-Greene said. "How in the world can I tell my child to dream if you know that's just not possible?"
About $4 million has been raised for the Promise fund, including $2 million from Travelers, $1 million from Hartford Hospital, $500,000 from the nonprofit Say Yes to Education, $200,000 from Newman's Own Foundation and $100,000 each from the Robert and Margaret Patricelli Family Foundation and the Hampshire Foundation, Sugarman said.
The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and the Hartford Consortium for Higher Education, composed of area colleges and universities, also have signed on as major partners.
The initial donations are enough to fund scholarships for the classes of 2016 and 2017, but Sugarman said a bigger fundraising push is underway to raise the rest of the $12 million, and perhaps dozens of millions more to establish a lasting endowment beyond 2023, when this year's fifth-graders will be graduating from high school.
Sugarman, founding president of the Connecticut Forum who was hired earlier this year to head the Hartford Promise, said a crucial task is spreading the word.
That means telling the CVS Pharmacy clerk in downtown Hartford that her children could be in line for thousands in scholarship money, and arriving at school open houses and student group meetings with slick pamphlets bearing a mission to "transform our city."
"We want to see the number of Promise scholars grow," Sugarman said. "And we are asking everybody to give what you can. Right? The teachers and counselors and parents and students, and frankly, the community and donors — give all you can to make this happen."
Raising $50 million in the next six years is one goal. Another is making sure more students who get to college stay on through graduation, which is why the program plans to pair the scholarship fund with a "college success" initiative, a support network with mentors, financial planning and internships.
Out of a thousand or so Hartford residents who annually graduate from city schools, about half of them enroll in college right away — around 300 students go to four-year colleges and roughly 200 attend two-year community colleges, said Sugarman, citing data from the district.
About 46 percent get their degrees within six years, he said.
Hartford high schools — magnet schools, neighborhood schools and the Achievement First charter school — are Promise-eligible and will be targeted this school year. There are plans for a spring celebration for the first scholarship winners, re-launch parties and "PEGs," Promise engagement groups to get community members thinking about the fund.
"We feel that as that 15 percent of students" — the inaugural class of Promise scholars — "talk to brothers and sisters, talk to friends, talk to cousins and say, 'I got this scholarship,' that that begins to build this college-going profile," Sugarman said.
Hartford students need at least a 93 percent attendance record and cumulative B average since ninth grade, and live in the city during all four high school years, to qualify for the scholarship.
But that news has been slow to reach students in the class of 2016, who were freshmen when Kishimoto formally launched the program in early 2013 after fundraisers met the initial $4 million goal.
Some seniors in the throes of college application season are just finding out about the promise.
Jesus Medina, a senior at Pathways Academy of Technology & Design, a city-run magnet school in East Hartford, unwittingly became a potential Promise scholar by just being himself. He usually gets As and Bs, doesn't skip school and lives in the city's South End with his parents.
"It was a big surprise," said Medina, 17, who heard about the scholarship at the start of this school year.
Medina wants to go to a four-year college and perhaps study computer science, maybe at UConn, which he considers a practical choice because of the lower in-state tuition. Money is tight: His father is retired and his mother is a school cafeteria worker, he said. As for himself, he has worked at Six Flags and is an office intern at Pathways, making minimum wage.
"We haven't really saved up money for college," Medina said, "so it's either a scholarship or a financial burden."
Jennifer Simmons, a school counselor at Pathways, said 11 out of 45 Hartford students in the school's senior class are eligible for the Promise scholarship, based on their grades and attendance. Another 10 seniors are on the cusp if they raise their grades this semester.
Simmons came to the Hartford school system from New Haven, where she saw the scholarship fund in that city as a motivational tool. The New Haven Promise offers up to full-tuition scholarships for certain graduating seniors who attend in-state public colleges, and a maximum $2,500 yearly award to students who enroll in Connecticut private colleges.
"From day one in ninth grade, we used the attendance and the GPA as an incentive for students: 'Make sure you're not missing too many days of school, you want to be eligible for the New Haven Promise. Make sure that you're keeping your grades up, you don't want to miss out on that New Haven Promise scholarship,'" Simmons said.
New Haven's program, inspired by the Kalamazoo Promise in Michigan, gave $1.2 million in tuition aid to about 430 students during the last school year, Executive Director Patricia Melton said. Yale University funds the scholarships.
For now, the Hartford Promise pledge of up to $20,000 per student can be applied to colleges that are private or public, in-state or out of state, covering tuition, books, housing or other college fees that are billed to a student. Scholars must be enrolled full-time and remain in good standing.
"I think that it changes the conversation about how realistic college can be for those students," Simmons said in a school office adorned with collegiate banners. The extra $5,000 a year could mean enrolling at a four-year university and living on campus, she said, instead of commuting to a two-year community college because it's less expensive.
"For a lot of students, they think of college and don't know how they can possibly afford it," she said, "and so it doesn't seem like a realistic option, or it's something that they really stress about."
Aspiring veterinarian Andrea Aware, 17, a straight-A Bulkeley student, said she has worried about paying for college since middle school.
"My family has always really struggled with money, and especially now, my dad's been having trouble finding a job that he can keep for a long time," said Aware, who is originally from Guatemala and would be the first in her immediate family to go to college. "My mom hasn't been working the last couple of years, because she's been too sick."
Aware sat at a table with Graham, her classmate who thought the promise sounded "too good to be true," and 17-year-old senior Shawn Tull, who wants to be a Hartford teacher someday and is working on a third version of his college essay. He lives with his mother, who is unemployed, he said.
All three rank near the top of Bulkeley's senior class, Allen-Greene said, and they are among at least 20 students at the South End school who are on track to be Promise scholars. In Bulkeley's class of 2014, 16 percent of students enrolled in a four-year college right after graduation, according to district data.
"Some people might say that maybe $20,000 is not enough to pay for full tuition," Aware said. "But to me, any amount of money is a big help."
Graham, Aware and Tull, racking their young minds for ways to pay for college, belong to a new Bulkeley Investment Club that was created with the idea of playing the financial markets and tapping any riches as an emergency college fund. Of course, they need to scrounge up a modest sum of seed money first.
Graham has also contemplated entering the Miss West Indian Social Club Scholarship Pageant next year, at her mother's suggestion. "She doesn't have the money to pay for college, so if I have to walk around on a stage to get $2,000, and look good and try and battle a bunch of girls to get $2,000 for college," Graham said, "then that's probably the best option for me."
"Money is a scarce resource in our family," her mother, Claudette Graham, wrote in an email to The Courant. "If the 'Promise' is true, the impact on Grace, our family and community will be powerful."
"It was a promise, but it hasn't happened yet," Allen-Greene said. "People aren't going to believe it until they see it."
Source: Promise of scholarships within reach for Hartford students
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