I just returned from a wonderful event. For the past three years, our faculty and staff have been serving as tutors for high school students in the Hillside Work Scholarship Connection. The program is designed to ensure that students graduate from high school and it has been remarkably successful, with graduation rates that are nearly twice the average graduation rate for the Rochester City schools. Nazareth plays a role by offering tutoring services for students in the program, and we intentionally conduct the tutoring sessions on our campus so that students start to see the possibility of graduating from high school and then going on to college. In the summer we run an overnight program for the students, during which they live in dorms and attend classes, experiencing life on a college campus first-hand.
The event I just attended is our end-of-semester party where we recognize the students for their successful completion of the tutoring sessions and we thank the tutors for all their hard work. It is truly heartwarming to see the excitement in the faces of the teenagers. At the start of the semester they often seemed unsure about coming here each week but today they looked confident. One of the students proudly wore a Nazareth t-shirt and smiled broadly when I said that she could wear that shirt when she comes here for college. One of our goals is to create hope for these kids, and we saw that hope blossoming today.
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