College Bound Programming (Early HS)

This work has been a long time coming, with involvement from many affiliate and national office colleagues along the way. It’s important to highlight that while the first Breakthrough site opened in 1978, it wasn’t until 2016 that our National Office hired a staff member to manage HS/College Bound programming. In contrast to our summer program and MS work, coordination of HS work Collaborative-wide is a much more recent effort. 

That said, since 2016 a lot has been accomplished! By 2017 affiliates had already surfaced the need for a national suite of resources to guide HS program development, and an inaugural work group of multiple affiliates began working together to build the first version of College Bound in a Box (CB in a B) which was released in the Spring of 2018. After CB in a B was released, several subsequent work groups convened to create additional resources, with a 9th grade expansion released in 2019 and a 10th grade work group convening in 2020 (which sadly did not finish their work due to the pandemic).

Since then, the National Office has expanded their focus to encompass both college access and success (HS and college), and in the summer of 2024, the Early HS Curriculum Update/Expansion project team began working on important updates and additions to the existing early HS resources.

There are so many areas that we can focus on in the college access space, from SAT/ACT prep to academic support to financial aid. Why did we choose to work on early HS resources?

The main reason is that this has consistently been expressed as a need from Breakthrough affiliate colleagues, even though the ways in which sites are doing this work varies. Some sites are new to HS programming and are looking to start with serving 9th graders, while others have HS programs but have had to scale them back at some point (often due to COVID) and are looking to restart their HS programs by serving early HS students. A few affiliates have full-time staff members who exclusively serve 9th and 10th grade students. While many of these folks have fantastic existing resources, others have requested additional support.

Nationally, we know that only 4 of our 25 affiliates (as of 12/24) have full time staff members focused only on 9th and 10th grades. While having separate staff for these grades is not a requirement or the only way to do this work, it points to an imbalance in our capacity nationally to serve our younger grades. In contrast, the number is much higher for staff who work solely with 11th/12th grades or “college access” as a whole. 

While we don’t (yet) capture data on work happening in 9th and 10th grade vs. 11th and 12th grade via our Collaborative Standards Assessment (CSA), one data point might serve as a proxy for early HS work. For our Quality Indicator on whether or not sites provide HS transition support, only 54% of sites met this standard in the 2023 CSA. 

We know that the earlier we can begin college access work, the better. As an organization that works with students starting in middle school, we have the gift of time. 9th and 10th grades in particular are critical for academic advising but are also foundational years for student-profile building, career exploration, building aspirations, identifying financial options, and beginning the college search. 

Finally, early HS work is critical to maintaining student retention and engagement in HS. Retention work is a challenge and trying to re-engage students later in HS without consistent 9th and 10th grade programming takes tons of time and effort.

This project is both to update existing 9th and 10th grade workshops/resources, and to create additional ones to expand our library of resources available.

Our existing workshops were created in 2019 and 2020, and needed to be adapted to reflect updates in the college access space as well as to incorporate Breakthrough’s Human First Framework.

We know that many folks have requested additional workshops so that programming can be more effectively differentiated across grade levels. We have added 10 additional workshops/resources to cover requested topics and add value to 9th and 10th grade program offerings.

As we updated and created workshops, we used a version of Breakthrough’s Curriculum Evaluation Tool that was adapted for this project. This tool served as a rubric and evaluation mechanism so we could ensure that our workshops met key criteria and are ready for folks to use. The CET covers many criteria, primarily student-centeredness, presenter accessibility and intended learning outcomes. We have also incorporated REDI considerations, Human First Framework alignment, as well as alignment with college access best practices in our CET criteria. The CET sheet is available to view, and you can access the review of each workshop/resource by navigating through the different tabs at the bottom of the sheet.