Findley Helping Families Prepare for College
Findley Elementary School is helping families to begin early in making plans for their children to attend college.
Every day at Findley Elementary starts in the gym where students chant out their graduation year (from college, not high school!) in spirited, peppy unison, grade by grade. It’s a great tone-setter. It would be worth doing if there were nothing more to it than that. But that ritual is just the beginning of more than another school day. Findley takes a long range view in more ways than that one.
For instance, each grade level has been “adopted” by an area college or university and made a campus visit field trip during the year. Just last week the 1st graders toured Drake University.
Tuesday night was another example. The school hosted an event billed as The Beginner’s Guide to Paying for College. That might sound like something more suited to a high school but that’s the point. Billy Kirby is a program coordinator for the I Have a Dream Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to motivating and empowering children from low-income communities to set and reach long range goals by providing mentoring, tutoring and enrichment. IHDF established Findley’s Dreamer Academy, complete with College Savings Accounts for all of the kids.
“The idea is to introduce families to the concept and process of college financing early on,” Kirby said after school on Tuesday as he prepared for the event that ran from 5:30-8:00. “Parents can get overwhelmed with information all at once when their kids are finishing high school and make rash decisions, especially if it’s a first-generation college family.”
Besides the $30 seed money to establish the CSA accounts Findley families are presented with a series of opportunities throughout the year to earn additional deposits. Completion of all of them equals a total of $230.
They’re called milestones and attendance at Tuesday night’s event was worth $30. Coming to parent/teacher conferences is worth $20. So is maintaining a school attendance rate of 95% or higher for a full semester. Student book logs compiled during the year are valued at $30, too.
Volunteers from Iowa Student Loan were on hand to help Tuesday night. ISL is another nonprofit dedicated to helping students afford and finance their college dreams. They passed out informational packets, helped serve the free meal that was offered, directed traffic and were presenters in classrooms on topics like budgeting and sources of college financial aid.
It can be more than a little bewildering for poor families who’ve never gone beyond high school to have a kindergartener bringing home invitations to college planning events at the neighborhood elementary school. And it might sound too good to be true.
“Recently one mother I was talking to about tonight’s event told me that she couldn’t afford the $30 to attend,” Kirby said. “She changed her mind when I explained that we were giving her student $30, not charging them.”
If a couple of hundred dollars sounds like a small drop in the big bucket of college costs, consider this: Research indicates that establishment of CSAs in the name of kids who would be first-generation college-goers in their families triples the chance that they will ever attend and increases their odds of actually graduating by fourfold, even if the amount in the account is less than $500.
So shout it out kindergarteners. 2032 will be here before you and your parents know it. And feed those college savings piggy banks. They will grow right along with you.
