College-bound St. Louis County Seniors Get Boost from Advising Corps

November 14, 2008, St. Louis Post-Dispatch - By Steve Giegerich

Jennings - Looking back, Antoinette Roberts recalls just one instance of receiving meaningful advice on how to proceed with the longtime goal of being the first in her family to go to college.

It came from a classroom teacher; Antoinette was still in junior high.

She's now a senior at Jennings High School.

Now, thanks to an innovative national counseling program, Antoinette has compressed four years of college prep into the three months since classes resumed in August.

And she's found out the art of applying to college is not unlike learning to drive a car.

"You can push the gas to go. But without anyone there to guide you, you really don't know what you're doing," said Antoinette.

The guide Antoinette hopes will propel her to the University of Louisville or another campus is Devon Cromwell.

A Jennings 2002 graduate, Cromwell is one of nine young men and women the National College Advising Corps has dispatched to community colleges and high schools across the state.

Headquartered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the corps places recent college graduates in counseling offices in low-income schools for tours of duty ranging from one to two years.

The program currently serves more than 13,000 students in 12 states. Jennings is among the first schools in Missouri targeted by the Corps.

During their tenure, the guides shepherd seniors - the majority intent on being first generation college students - through the run-up to the ACT exam, the selection of a college, the nuances of filling out an application, writing admissions essays and navigating financial aid documents.

It is a routine that many middle- and upper-class students, nurtured by college-educated parents and secondary school counselors with contacts in college admissions offices, take for granted.

"I had no idea about the process," said first generation student Cheree Rawlins, 27, the program coordinator for the Missouri College Advising Corps, based at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

"My parents wanted me to go, but they just didn't know what to do."

When he was at Jennings, Cromwell, a 2007 Mizzou graduate, turned to his mother who holds a two-year degree, for advice on college.

Beyond her counseling, he said, "the only thing I remember is a science teacher giving us a pep talk about the ACT test before our senior year."

Cromwell's presence provides Jennings with a resource woefully missing from many poor urban and rural districts. The Corps also has guides at Soldan High School in St. Louis and the Florissant Valley campus of St. Louis Community College to help students transfer to four-year institutions.

A 2005 study by the University of Southern California determined the availability of counselors in American high schools has not kept pace with the increase in students, rich and poor, planning to attend college.

The report found a student-counselor ratio in excess of 300:1 in public schools with high minority enrollments.

Moreover, the other duties assigned to counselors - such as mediating disputes, crisis counseling and assisting with course schedules - meant that each counselor each year spends an average of 38 minutes per student on college advising.

"Having someone here" to assist with college prep "is really helpful because the counselors have a thousand other things to do," said Antoinette Roberts. "Mr. Cromwell is here specifically to help us do what we need to do. I'm always in his office."

Indeed, Cromwell matches the national average for college counseling in the first 38 minutes of each school day. And then adds to the total with every successive tick of the clock until the day is over.

When he's not huddling with students in his cubbyhole office, Cromwell is in the corridors, classrooms or holding court in the cafeteria, dispensing advice to seniors and underclassmen alike.

"If the sophomores and juniors see what Devon is doing it will make a huge difference for them down the line," said the national executive director for the advising Corps, Nicole Hurd, during a visit to Jennings on Wednesday.

Access to college officials is an important difference a guide can make.

Over the summer, Cromwell reached out to admissions officers in colleges across the state.

Cromwell may not have known anyone at Southeast Missouri State University prior to becoming an adviser.

But he now knows who to call when the time comes to make the case for one of the several Jennings' seniors who have made the Cape Girardeau school atop their first choice.

When Cromwell chaperoned a group of students to Columbia, it marked the first time senior Britney Triplett set foot on a college campus.

Mizzou immediately shot to the top of Britney's list.

"It kind of felt like I was already attending school there, like I belonged," she said.

It's a sensation that Britney, always sure she wanted to go to college but unsure, as the first in her family with the opportunity to go about it, never believed possible before Cromwell's arrival.

As she began her senior year, "I didn't think I'd be able to go to college. But Mr. Cromwell breaks everything down," said Britney, fresh from submitting her first scholarship application on Wednesday. "To have someone here to help you makes all the difference."

sgiegerich@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8172