By AUDREY BENGTSON
PHOTO CREDIT Adobe Stock photo
College-bound seniors at High Point High School, including several from College Park, will take blankets, bed linens and Chromebooks to their dorm rooms with them this fall, thanks to a grant from the city.
The $2,750 grant, which the College Park City Council announced in January, is paying for the school’s Flying from the HP Nest program, which supplies care packages for students who are headed to college after graduation. Approximately 137 High Point students live in College Park.
The grant paid for care packages for 14 students. In addition, four June graduates will get Chromebooks during Senior Awards Night later this spring.
“The bulk of our work now is creating these college-bound care packages,” said Sherry Felix, an English teacher and the school’s Title I coordinator. Felix, the 10th grade’s sponsor, helps decide what the grant money will go toward.
Part of the grant pays the registration fees for 42 students to join the nonprofit First Generation College Bound, which aims to increase the number of low-income students who graduate from high school and move on to college.
“I would say this is … the second year our principal is … looking at college and career readiness, sort of almost as a separate, big rock where we have someone who is really focused as a coordinator,” Felix said.
“We have now a cohort of teams, counselors and other educators and administrators that are really just focused on helping students, like, put the students in the appropriate classes … to help them actually graduate,” she added.
The program aims to help the school’s 3,100 students graduate from High Point, which Felix said “does not have a high graduation rate” partly because of low incomes.
“We know that there’s an economic need, there’s a socioeconomic need for our students,” Felix said.
Felix said she hopes the program will expand as the school reaches into the community for churches and others for support and funding so more students can easily transition into their post-high school education.
Right now, “this is just a small treat,” Felix said.
