“Dominique absolutely would have made something of himself without our help,” says Lucas Spielfogel, winter light flooding the windows of his office in an old two-story frame house at 611 North St.
The executive director of Baton Rouge Youth Coalition was talking about Dominique Ricks, one of the stars in BRYC’s firmament.
The idea is to recruit promising students in East Baton Rouge Parish who BRYC thinks can shoot the educational moon given financial help, tutoring and just plain encouragement—the kind of help good students from supportive families get, Spielfogel says.
Ricks, a graduate of Belaire High School, becomes the first person in his family to graduate from college when he receives a degree in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May.
Of BRYC’s 75 students, one is white. The rest of the students are black. Only one student goes to a private school; the rest are in public schools.
“The young woman in private school goes to Episcopal,” Spielfogel says. “She’s low income.” She might not have been accepted by BRYC had it not been for her mother.
“She was insistent,” Spielfogel says. “She wanted her daughter working with other successful African-American students. There aren’t that many African-American students at Episcopal.”
BRYC offers bright students the edge they need to win scholarships that help them get into good colleges and universities. There are some quality public schools in East Baton Rouge Parish, Spielfogel says, but many don’t prepare students well for college.
“It’s not just adults who think the schools here are poor,” he says. “A lot of our BRYC students are terribly frustrated with their schools. They want education here to change drastically.”
“I felt the kids had been lied to,” says Dan Kahn, a Teach For America corps member from San Francisco who started BRYC in 2009. Kahn met Ricks at Belaire. “They’d been told if they worked hard, they were set. They’d go to college. They’d get good jobs.”
Ricks says that assessment “hit the nail on the head. I got a superficial understanding of what going to college was about. My grades were good, but I had an ACT [score] of 12. I didn’t get ACT explained to me until my junior year.”
Ricks, who describes himself as having been a good student in elementary and high school, thinks the ACT is “a poor measure of aptitude. It rewards students who take tests well.”
“BRYC starts with the individual,” he says. “They’re working with talented students. When I was in elementary school, my mother made me read a book a week during the summer. When I got to high school, I was reading at the level of a college freshman. Reading plays a huge role” in doing well in school, Ricks notes.
Someone needed to tell high school students from low-income families that they hadn’t been prepared for college, Kahn says. His answer was BRYC.
“BRYC started at Belaire,” he says. “But it really got going in 2009.” That’s when Kahn was no longer teaching at the school. “I knew I couldn’t do what I wanted to do inside the East Baton Rouge Parish school system,” he says.
Kahn’s fiancee, Euhbin Song, another TFA teacher, mentored Belaire student Markeisha Hill, now a student at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.
“Culture shock?” Kahn says. “Yes. And financial shock. And weather shock.” Song gave her winter coat to Hill.
Hill has a 3.7 GPA at Wesleyan, where she’s on full scholarship—about $250,000 over four years.
“Freshman year was a hard year,” Hill says, “because I was acclimating myself to a new culture and a new environment. Often, I would feel overwhelmed and wish I could just go home. BRYC provides support beyond high school. With the help and guidance of its staff, I learned to readjust and make a good life for myself here.”
She’ll graduate in 2016 with degrees in English and sociology, returning to Baton Rouge to “work in community revitalization and education” with Teach For America, she says.
BRYC’s tutoring and mentoring of high school freshmen, leadership retreats and seminars, ACT prep, writing classes—lots of them—and a college boot camp for rising high school seniors are assigned to give participants a better shot at getting into top colleges with financial help.
Ricks may have had the drive to make something of himself without BRYC, but he wouldn’t have gotten into the University of Wisconsin, or LSU, with his pre-BRYC ACT score of 12. That was in 2009. A year later, he scored 22 on his ACT. He received a full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Improving your ACT score takes practice,” Spielfogel says. “Students have to see the questions over and over to see the patterns.”
BRYC high school students get three years of ACT prep, starting their sophomore years. That first course is 30 hours, with four practice tests and weekend tutoring. “We leverage all the networking that’s out there,” Spielfogel says. “We use students from LSU as tutors, students from Southern University and Teach For America students.”
Spielfogel, a Yale graduate in history from Boca Raton, Fla., got his $50,000-a-year job as BRYC executive director after a TFA stint in Baton Rouge.
He hopes to boost BRYC’s annual $360,000 budget by $100,000. “We’ve pushed to be funded by this community,” he says, “rather than by my resources or Dan’s.” BRYC mines more than 200 local money sources ranging from donations of $5 to $50,000. Much of it is processed through the Baton Rouge Area Foundation’s Donor Advised Fund.
Cordell Haymon, senior vice president of SGS Petroleum Service Corp. in Baton Rouge, knows the work of TFA as chairman of the organization’s south Louisiana board. He and his wife, Ava, sponsored Spielfogel as a TFA teacher and were among the earliest financial contributors to BRYC. A goal of his is to find ways to keep TFA alumni in Baton Rouge.
“Baton Rouge Youth Coalition is a primary leader in the education reform movement that you see all over the country,” Haymon says. “A lot of it has come out of TFA.”
“The challenge,” says Haymon, 70, “is to get the next generation of donors into the game.”
BRYC’s 2014 enrollment is 80 to 85 students with a rough breakdown of 20 freshmen, 20 sophomores, 20 juniors and 20 seniors. Spielfogel notes that in the organization’s first four years, BRYC fellows have a 93% college retention rate. The national college graduation rate for low-income, first-generation students is 11%.
Also in the organization’s first four years of existence, BRYC students were awarded more than $4 million in scholarships from institutions such as LSU, NYU, Tulane, Auburn, Morehouse, Howard, Emory and the University of Alabama. Spielfogel expects students to do even better this spring.
Some BRYC students have never heard of the very colleges that think enough of them to offer full scholarships. While it’s important for students to “escape the cycle of struggle,” he says, that doesn’t mean they have to live apart from their families to prepare for college.
“You don’t graduate from your own family,” Spielfogel says. “But that’s true for high-income students as well as low-income. People have problems with their families. It’s a universal concept.”
In May, Ricks will return to Baton Rouge as a member of Teach For America.
“Dominique had financial challenges he wouldn’t wish on his own kids,” Spielfogel says. “But it’s probably what made him what he is today.”
And Ricks returns to Baton Rouge with more than a college degree. Says Spielfogel: “He’s got credibility.”
With a college degree nearly firmly in hand, Ricks knows what he wants going forward. “When I get back, I’ll spend more than [the minimum] two years with TFA, definitely,” he says. “I want to pay it forward.” Then law school. Then, adds Ricks, “I want to be governor of Louisiana.”
Colleges to which BRYC seniors have been accepted
Brown University
Tufts University
University of Virginia
Northeastern University
Tulane University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Emory University
LSU
LSU Honors College
Morehouse College
Howard University
Tuskegee University
Southern University
University of Alabama
Auburn University
UL Lafayette
UL Monroe
Louisiana Institute of Technology
University of Houston
Coastal Carolina University
Southeastern Louisiana University
Baylor University
Xavier University
Prairie View A&M University
Spelman College
Dillard University
Texas Southern University
BRYC graduates are currently attending the following universities and colleges
Stanford University
New York University
Wesleyan University
Clark University
Guilford College
University of Wisconsin-Madison
LSU
LSU Honors College
UL Monroe
Northwestern State University
Dillard University
Morehouse College
Howard University
UL Lafayette
$1 million
Total scholarships and financial aid collectively awarded to BRYC Fellows as of April 3. The amount is expected to near $2 million by the end of the summer. This figure does not include TOPS support.
Gates Millennium Recipient
BRYC senior Beatrice Kariuki of Broadmoor High School was selected as a recipient of the Gates Millennium Scholarship. She is one of just 1,000 high school seniors nationwide chosen from this year’s applicant pool of 30,000. She is the fourth student in BRYC’s five-year history to win the coveted award, which pays for a student’s entire undergraduate and, if they choose, graduate experience, and also provides support through mentorship and leadership development programs. She will attend Emory University in the fall.
