Whenever Dreama Gentry, founder and executive director of Partners for Education at Berea College, gets questions about why she wanted her college to become involved in early childhood and K-12 education, she has a simple answer.
As a college, Gentry says Berea can only reach the 1,600 students on its campus. But by working with schools in the surrounding community, the college is better able to fulfill its mission of serving Appalachia—one of the poorest regions in the nation—by reaching thousands of students of all ages.
That work will now expand from 35,000 students to 45,000 students thanks to a new $6 million implementation grant that Berea College won Tuesday through the U.S. Department of Education’s 2016 Promise Neighborhood competition. The grants are renewable for up to five years.
Berea, which in 2011 became the nation’s first rural Promise Neighborhood grantee, is one of two institutions of higher education among the competition’s six winners. The other is Drexel University, which plans to use its grant in a two-square-mile area near University City in Philadelphia.
Patterned after Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, projects funded by the Promise Neighborhood grants are meant to provide “cradle-to-career support for at-risk children in communities across the country, offering meaningful resources that will help them achieve their potential,” U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said Tuesday in announcing the latest grantees.
Leaders at both Berea and Drexel say a major thrust and focus of their work through the Promise grants will be to help launch more students from impoverished circumstances into more prosperous lives by way of college.
“One of the goals is the college-going piece,” Gentry said Tuesday in a phone interview with Diverse.
