A BluePrint for Success: Case Studies of Successful - Educational ...

A Blueprint for Success
in-kind donations were provided by Mounds Park Academy and the Saint Paul Public Schools. BSP
now has seven community partners that provide in-kind services to our students.
BSP’s Executive Director and Director of Development lead all the fundraising efforts. The board is
very engaged with fundraising. The BSP Executive Director indicated that “they give and they get.”
She added that the Board members understand that fundraising is a crucial part of their job. A challenge,
however, is that because BSP is a relatively small program in terms of students served, it has
had a difficult time attracting the major corporations in Twin Cities, despite the successful outcomes.
What We Do Best
Executive Director Emily Wingfield indicated that BSP is most successful at building students’ belief,
starting at 6th grade, that they will attend college. She noted that “there are no exceptions; college
is the expectation of Breakthrough students.” She attributed this success to “early, sustained intervention
with our ‘students teaching students model’ where young Breakthrough students have
diverse, talented role models for six years.”
Lessons Learned
BSP has evolved so quickly that many lessons have been learned in a short period of time. Breakthrough
started as a summer program for middle school students and BSP was the first program in
the collaborative to offer a high school program. As the students have advanced through school, BSP
has expanded to continue serving them. Attentiveness to data and being adaptive has developed BSP
into a full-fledged year-round program for 6th through 12th grade students and starting this next
year, will continue to expand to serve them though college completion.
A key lesson learned was the importance of professional college counseling for the students. At beginning,
Executive Director Emily Wingfield noted that she did not “get how important a professional
college counselor was” to the preparation of high school students headed to college. She noted
that many other programs utilize AmeriCorps/Vista members to provide college counseling for a
large number of students. While these counselors are helpful, after close examination of the specific
needs of BSP students, it was decided best to hire an expert in college counseling and financial aid.
The person selected provides these services to wealthy families in the area. At first we did not understand
why families were paying him $10k to help their kid get into college. Now we get it; this is
very valuable information and we want BSP students to have access to these services.
If provided the opportunity to do something different, Executive Director Wingfield indicated that
she would like to “serve all of our students, specifically our high school students, year round. Currently,
we serve our middle school students year round and our high school students only during the
school year. We are in the process of designing a high school summer program.”
Educational Policy Institute 16 www.educationalpolicy.org