Grants to aid bridge year programs in Louisiana announced

By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced grantees for their Accelerate ED: Seamless Pathways to Degrees and Careers program, and Louisiana organizations will benefit.

The program’s goal is to provide students with valuable postsecondary education and also the tools, resources, support, and relationships to help them find a career. They can take courses in areas of their interest and finish with an associate’s degree by the end of their 13th year of schooling. It can also be an economical option for students who are unable to afford college.

“Our education pathways strategy, which includes this Accelerate ED grant, works to ensure that more Black and Latino students from low income backgrounds obtain credentials of value and have the professional skills, the personal agency, and the social capital needed to thrive in the workforce as young adults,” said Sara Allan, director of early education and pathways at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Allan said the foundation began working 20 years ago to prepare more high school students on a post-secondary career path. High schools can work with employers and higher education partners to bring career-connected learning into secondary education.

“Our education systems are not yet offering these kinds of opportunities to all students,” Allan said. “This work has become even more urgent in the face of COVID-19, which has laid bare the inequities in our education and workforce systems and illustrated the stark differences in which students have access to these learning experiences…and which do not. In particularly, we see many Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds deferring their dreams and opting out of their pathways to take jobs to support their families and juggle other responsibilities.”

One of the grantees is Louisiana’s Growing Bridge Year Pathways Across New Orleans. The grant will support three local training providers who will use the state’s 13th year bridge year program to create industry-aligned pathways to an associate degree or an equivalent industry-based credential. A goal is to increase the number of local students attending bridge year programs to 160 in 2022-23 and 250 in 2023-24.

Operation Spark, a training provider in software development, is one of the providers working in Louisiana to expand programming for a bridge year. Next Level NOLA is a bridge program with business services, digital media/IT, and skilled crafts pathways. Another provider is the New Orleans Career Center, which is a technical training provider in healthcare, engineering, and tourism/hospitality. The New Orleans Career Center will operate LAUNCH, another bridge year program, starting next year.

“To ensure more students have access, we’re going to create resources that help families and students navigate the decision making process,” said Jake Gleghorn, director of strategic initiatives for the New Orleans Career Center. “LAUNCH is going to provide an additional opportunity for our program…that allows a different option for a different subset of students.”

There will be a collaborative approach among the Louisiana providers to create resources to share best practices and codified lessons to support pathway development across the state.

Thomas Lasley, chair of the board of directors for the National Council on Teacher Quality, said the 13-year model advocated by the Accelerated ED program can help high schools become better partners with students, parents, community stakeholders, and higher education institutions.

“(We can)…ensure that students have the opportunity to explore their career interests in ways that allow them to take a first and very important step down the road of career exploration and cutting college costs and toward the goal of career engagement,” Lasley said.

These bridge year programs can also provide a valuable alternative (at little-to-no cost) to students at a time when college enrollment is dropping. According to spring 2021 stats from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, overall postsecondary enrollment dropped by 3.5 percent (603,00 students) in spring 2021. This decline was seven times larger than the rate of decline reported in spring 2020. Undergraduate students accounted for all of the decline. Community colleges were hit the hardest with a 9.5 percent drop.

This article originally published in the May 30, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.