Since 1989, the Rhode Island Children’s Crusade for Higher Education has recruited third-graders in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Newport and Woonsocket, offering them special support and mentorship to keep them on the path to college.
Each year, about 4,000 youngsters participate in the nonprofit’s programs, which include academic enrichment, career exploration, social and personal development, and encouragement from caring adults. More than 1,100 graduates of the program are enrolled in college, aided by scholarships from the Crusade.
Next year, however, a key part of the program will change. In an attempt to make the most of its limited resources, the Crusade has decided to start its work in the sixth grade.
“In general we are an organization that set out with an ambitious idea in 1989 to pick kids that were very young and put them on a college trajectory, kids that would not be on that trajectory otherwise,” said Mary Sylvia Harrison, president and CEO of the nonprofit. “But we had to ground that work in reality.”
And part of working in reality, she said, was recognizing that starting with third-graders was making it more difficult to accomplish the Crusade’s goal.
“We have a highly mobile population,” said Harrison. “In a typical year, the mobility among our kids, between changing homes and schools, can be 25 to 30 percent. We have tried to really do an outstanding job of tracking these kids down, but keeping track of them to keep them in a 10-year program has required extraordinary resources and extraordinary creativity.”
She said that this is exacerbated by the fact that the Crusade has nowhere to turn to help track these students. The school districts don’t necessarily know where the children will move, and the state doesn’t have consistent student ID numbers that would help with tracking.
And in addition to the extra resources it takes to track students for 10 years, which is on top of the $10,000 in free programs and services provided to each of the students, the success rates are much lower because of the mobility throughout that time period, she said.
“What we have found with our kids who are highly mobile is we only have about half the chance of making a difference in their life,” Harrison said. “That mobility wasn’t contemplated by the founders.”
The other reason for admitting students later that wasn’t recognized in 1989 was the evidence linking middle school and high school intervention with success in life, she said.
“We’ve isolated and compared our most successful kids, those that graduate and go on to college, with kids that just graduate or kids that don’t graduate at all, and our most successful kids were engaged with the middle school and the high school programs,” she said. “We don’t see a lot of strong evidence that something they did at the elementary level has had much effect.”
The analysis led the Crusade to reallocate some of its limited resources, Harrison said.
“We decided that it would mean focusing on the population that we do our best work with, the middle and high school, and shortening the period of time that the mobility factor can operate against us,” she said. “We’re playing to our strengths. We have always defined ourselves as a self-reflective, continually improving organization, and it only makes sense to be accountable to our supporters and funders by focusing on work that’s value added and will lead to success.”
Peter McWalters, the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education, has expressed support for the new strategy, saying it will help the Crusade “continue to play a vital role as we work together to bring all of our students to proficiency.”
