Athletic Scholars Advancement Program (ASAP), Mission High School
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Mission Statement
The Athletic Scholars Advancement Program (ASAP) is a community and school partnership at Mission High School in San Francisco that inspires high school athletes to achieve academic and post-secondary goals. We provide summer enrichment programs, individualized college counseling, and college persistence support to student athletes to help them on their paths to and through college. To date, ASAP has sent over 815 low-income scholars on to colleges and universities throughout the country. In addition, we have send over 1550 students to summer programs on college campuses to expose them to college environments. In ASAP’s Class of 2016, 70% of our students went on to 4-year colleges and universities and the remaining 30% went on to 2-year colleges. Over 95% of our students are first generation college students.
About This Cause
ASAP was founded in 2004 after several Mission students, including an athlete, were lost to gun violence. This tragic event caused the Athletic Director at Mission High, as well as others at the school and in the community, to recognize the acute need to motivate and support students to stay in school and to reach toward a college education. ASAP’s serves student-athletes, grades 9-12, at Mission High School. Our students generally reside in San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods: Bayview-Hunter’s Point, the Tenderloin, and the Western Addition. Some of our students live in foster homes or are homeless. Many live with a single parent or relatives other than parents. Over 61% of the students at Mission High School come from immigrant families and over 70% of student families report incomes below the poverty level. Since over 98% of our students are first generation college students, many of our students and their families need help in navigating the complicated college admissions process and support while in college to graduate. The ultimate goal of ASAP’s service model is to change the culture at Mission High to a college-oriented culture and to enable students to graduate from high school and then to attend and graduate from college. Over the past 12 years of service, ASAP has not only changed the lives of the student athletes it has served, but it has changed the whole environment of the school into a college-going culture. One of ASAP’s greatest accomplishments is that the four-year college-going rate at Mission High School has tripled since our program began. Each year about 96% of ASAP participants will go to college, and over 65% will go to 4-year colleges or universities. ASAP’s three primary program components are: 1) Summer Programs, 2) Individualized College Counseling, and 3) College Persistence Support Summer Program participation is a key indicator of ASAP’s impact on our students. In the summer of 2016, ASAP sent 160 students to academic or athletic summer programs on college campuses. The academic programs included University of Texas, Austin’s Sports Medicine program, a Women’s Leadership institute at Barnard College, and a psychology program at Johns Hopkins University. We also sent students to 14 different athletic programs, including the University of California, Berkeley’s soccer camp, Stanford track and field camp, and U.C. Santa Cruz volleyball camp. ASAP partners with the camp providers whenever possible to get scholarships or partial scholarships for our students. In addition, ASAP pays for each student’s roundtrip transportation, any required books and/or equipment, and we give them spending money so that they can participate in other activities with the other students there. The summer programs constitute ASAP’s third biggest portion of our budget, after personnel and scholarships. Participation in these summer programs provides our students with the chance to live in a college environment, to live in the dorms, eat in the cafeteria, and begin to envision themselves as future college students. In addition, it provides our students with a growth opportunity to learn new skills and to develop more independence. Many of our students use these initial experiences in a college environment as subject matter on their college applications and to inform them about the type of college that they might want/not want to attend. During the school year 2015 – 2016, ASAP worked with approximately 100 seniors at Mission High to provide them with Individualized College Counseling. Utilizing our 15 or so trained volunteers and pairing them with seniors, we helped these students to make their college lists of where they would like to apply, write and edit their personal statements and college applications, apply for financial aid and scholarships that will enable them to be able to afford college, and help with many of the intermediate steps in the college application process. We also support our students by providing them with mock interviews for scholarships, helping them to compare financial aid offers, and then to enroll and matriculate the colleges of their choice. This year, as we have assisted our seniors in applying to college, we continue to build out ASAP’s support of our alumni already enrolled in college, which we call our College Persistence Support. ASAP added a new staff position in 2015 to focus on designing and implementing ASAP’s college persistence support. Our College Connection Coordinator has both researched best practices in the field of college persistence and to piloted some new forms of support. He also been holding focus groups of ASAP alumni in college to hear from them what types of support might be helpful to increase their chances of being successful in college. ASAP has also added a new element to our college persistence support in 2016. This year we have launched an Alumni Peer Mentoring Program. We have trained 11 alumni of ASAP who are upper class men in college to act as near peer mentors to 21 freshmen at their same colleges who are also ASAP alumni. This program is taking place on 8 campuses, including San Francisco City College, San Francisco State, five campuses in the University of California system, and Ohio Wesleyan University. We have developed a curriculum and materials for the mentors to help them support the younger students and to provide campus specific information (i.e. tips on where to go for tutoring, how to best utilize professor and teacher’s aid office hours, suggestions for forming study groups, etc.), and we are paying stipends to each of the mentors in recognition of the time spent guiding their mentees. This is a very exciting new element of our program, and if successful, we will expand to additional campuses next year. In addition to tracking the number of students attending summer programs and the number of students who attend college as well as where they go to college, we are now able to follow our individual student’s progress in college using data from the National Student Clearinghouse. In 2016, ASAP’s College Connection Coordinator compiled data from the ASAP classes of 2008 – 2015 to see which students graduated, transferred, were still enrolled or dropped out. This information will help us to guide future students to find schools where they are likely to be successful.