In January, with the beginning of a new calendar year, I take a moment for reflection. The holiday season’s slower pace allows time to assess what is going well and areas for improvement. We ask our scholars to engage in a similar exercise through our mid-year survey, and I’m pleased to report that over 50% of our scholars said they are doing better than at the year’s start. There are a lot of reasons this could be. The beginning of a new school year is an anxious time full of unknowns, especially for first-generation college students like ours. As the year gets underway, this dissipates, and things start to feel better. Yet, with over 90% of scholars saying that the support they received from EPAAF worked for them last term, I take pride in the potential impact of our efforts.
Over the years, we have built strong college support systems and structures that resonate with our scholars. As we expand our mission to include support for community college and vocational pathways, we enter a new frontier with much to learn. The vocational pathway is full of myriad possibilities, and with those possibilities come a variety of unfamiliar programs to navigate alongside our scholars. The process to enroll, the requirements, the costs and aid available, and the schedule and duration of the programs are new to us. While we have celebrated early successes, like Michelle, who has earned her dental assisting certificate and is now thriving in a full-time dental office role and loving it, we’ve also faced some early roadblocks and disappointments in the process of getting started. In the case of Antonio and Martin, program requirements hindered their plans to start their vocational programs in August as planned alongside their college-going peers. For students without a strong support system, this could have prevented them from starting at all, but with our help, they were both able to successfully begin JobTrain’s carpentry program in December.
We may not have all the answers, but our commitment to learning and evolving remains unwavering. We strive to be responsive to our scholars' needs, ensuring they navigate the complexities of adulthood with confidence and success.