Celebrating Excellence

Recognizing the urgent need for education reform in New York City, and frustrated by the number of bright students falling through the cracks at high schools in New York’s poorest neighborhoods, CUP launched REACH (Rewarding Achievement) in 2007 to put the infrastructure in place so that students from any participating urban high school could compete on par with their private and suburban school peers in Advanced Placement (AP) college preparatory coursework, helping students break the cycle of poverty and matriculate to better colleges than were ever before available to them.

• Today, REACH touches more students than any program of its kind in the United States.

Empowering Students

REACH offers students a series of free Saturday course-specific AP prep workshops, and gives incentive scholarships—REACH Scholar Awards—to participating students for every AP exam score of 3, 4 or 5 they earn.  It works: In less than three years, REACH has organically grown to 33 schools.  In these schools, all students are offered enrollment into the REACH Scholar program if they sign up for any REACH AP course subject.  REACH launched in 2007 with a total of 610 students registered.  A year later, registration increased by nearly 500%, with 3,000 students signed up for the challenge for the 2008 challenge.   REACH is on track to double that number this year year.

Improving Infrastructure

REACH also provides teachers with professional development workshops, and rewards educators and schools with performance-based grants they can invest to strengthen academic programs and enhance AP course offerings at their schools. Over the past two years, we have provided professional development training for 150 AP teachers from participating REACH schools, positively impacting not only the REACH students, but all their students.

Nurturing Leaders

With our focus on training and incentivizing students and teachers, most REACH schools have expanded their AP course offerings in the past two years. At a time when the majority of schools in low income neighborhoods are dramatically cutting AP programs due to budget cuts or lack of student demand, REACH continues to grow, empowering the next generation of leaders.

• Being a REACH Mentor

My REACH Forward mentee, a high school senior from a public school in the South Bronx, studied through REACH her junior year and earned a ‘5’ on AP Physics and ‘4’ on AP U.S. History.   She also won Rookie of the Year on her FIRST Robotics Team.  Her face lights up when talking about dreams of someday working for NASA in aeronautics. …And when she began applying to colleges this year, her high school guidance counselor told her that “only the Valedictorian is allowed to apply to Harvard” and encouraged her to fill out a Fordham application because it ‘came with an $85 fee waiver.’  Fordham doesn’t have an aeronautical engineering program.  He never mentioned MIT or Cornell as options for her.  That’s where we come in.  By enrolling in REACH Forward (which piloted last year and will be open to all REACH seniors this year that have multiple 4’s and 5’s on sophomore and junior year APs), a whole new world of opportunity – and confidence – opened up to her.  Two of her peers in the REACH Forward program have received early acceptance offers from MIT already, and she is awaiting word from her post-REACH Forward first choice, Cornell.

As a mentor, what is even more rewarding for me about reversing ‘under-matching’ the high school counselors are doing is that once my mentee gets into a more competitive school, it will also open up that spot at Fordham for another student from her school who would have been robbed of it and tracked toward community college if all of the spots were taken up by students with 4s and 5s.  I’ve helped two students dramatically improve their college and life trajectories and come that much closer to achieving their dreams.

Tami Kesselman – REACH Mentor