SCD ENRICHMENT PROGRAM

Our school-based program (program works with students during the day as a course) gives access to advanced courses (gifted and talented, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate program, honors and concurrent enrollment courses) to marginalized middle and high school students. For gifted children navigating their gifted identity has always had its difficulties. When you are one of the few who process their world differently, you tend to feel isolated. This is even more the case with gifted BIPOC students, especially when navigating their cultural world does not allow them to discover and cultivate their gifted and academic identities in traditional school settings. Our program is designed to act as a safe space for gifted students with an emphasis on our most marginalized students, to unmask and develop their gifted abilities/identities and allows them to have an individualized blueprint to appreciate the different perspectives through the lens of their gifted identity. Our program exists to bridge the gap and identification processes by creating culturally-based solutions to identify more gifted and advanced BIPOC students, develop our students superpowers through academic, gifted and cultural identity development and through enriching and exposing them to near peer BIPOC college students and professionals who share their same identities.

As we support middle and high school students in gifted education and advanced coursework, the support of our BIPOC college mentors is vital in the development of our students. Our college mentors provide their lived experiences as a college student and provide tutoring and academic support to our students. They support our students in hours of support during our school program and also provide community support while hosting Mentor Monthly sessions and weekly college readiness workshops. We use the observations of our Education Coordinators and our college mentors to begin the process to formally recommend the unidentified gifted students for gifted school services. Equipping our college mentors with the frame of perspective, language and trained observation skills are necessary in our program identifying more BIPOC gifted and talented students. Our BIPOC college Mentors allow SCDEP students to observe and learn from college students that share their identity, which creates positive images to replace any negative biases with positive truths. We also support our college students as they develop the necessary skills to become successful adults. We created the College Mentor Catalyst Program, that contains modules for our college mentors to participate in to build up their executive functioning skills in order to be successful adults, college students and mentors. Each module is based on an area that impacts the needs of the students. College mentors receive stipends per module and create a plan of action and budget for completing each topic in order to test out their new skills.These areas will impact our future college mentors and we will continue to evaluate a trend of needs as we build the College Mentor Catalyst program.