Admissions Report
REACH at Fordham Prep
By Daniel Gustafson, SJ
For three weeks in July, Fordham Prep’ s hallways welcomed a younger and smaller group of students than usual. Fifty-three rising sixth graders spent three weeks living in a Fordham University dormitory, taking classes at Fordham Prep, spending afternoons playing in the Prep gymnasium and on the back field, and going on field trips around the city on the weekends.
For the first time, the candidate class of the REACH Program( Recruiting Excellence in Academics for Catholic High Schools) spent the residential portion of their summer at Fordham Prep. Their counterparts in the second and third year of REACH spent the same three weeks at the University of Scranton. All three years reunite for three weeks of class at Regis High School, followed by Saturday classes throughout the school year.
REACH is a program dedicated to recruiting and supporting high-achieving middle school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The goal of REACH is to help its graduates get into a college preparatory school. Last year REACH sent its graduates \ to Fordham Prep, Regis, Xavier, the Loyola School and Malloy.
After the predictable homesickness of the first several days subsided, the REACH students quickly came to feel at home at the Prep and in the dorm. Topics of conversation shifted from counting down the time until the next phone call home to reliving highlights of that afternoon’ s soccer game and comparing thoughts on The Giver, the book the students read in their REACH English class. The true
academic drive of the REACH students was apparent one evening in the dorm when a small crowd of ten- and eleven-year olds were wholly engrossed by solving Rubik’ s cubes.
A unique opportunity afforded by staying in New York for these three weeks was having REACH alumni speak to the students just joining the REACH family. The original REACH class is now a couple of years out of college and beginning careers or continuing their studies in graduate school. Seeing their predecessors, complete with college degrees, facial hair and gratitude for their own REACH experiences, gave the current students a broader perspective on what this program is about and the opportunities it can provide.
In their time with the students, teachers and staff spent a great deal of time emphasizing the importance of being“ open to growth,” one of the five guiding principles of the REACH program. By the end of the three weeks of REACH at Fordham, we all found that we had learned far more about being open to growth than we had expected. Fifty-three rising sixth graders left their friends and families and sacrificed a large part of their summer vacation for the sake of challenging themselves academically and socially. Fifteen high school and college students, including seven Fordham Prep students and alumni, gave up their own summers for to serve as counselors for the sixth graders. If so many of the young people around us were so generous with their own time and talent to build up the REACH program, how could we not strive to do the same?
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