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BY SARAH POZGAY

In print | Published March 5, 2009

The College Access Center of Delaware County, which opened this semester in Chester, has just completed its first month of service to community members seeking information about postsecondary educational opportunities. The center is the first initiative of the recently formed Chester Council of Higher Education, a non-profit consortium of six area colleges and universities, including Swarthmore.

The center provides Delaware County students with services ranging from tutoring in ACT and SAT preparation to assistance with the financial aid application process to workshops on writing college essays. It also offers services to adults or students seeking any type of postsecondary education.
The idea for the center is certainly not new. It has been in the works for a few years now but is finally coming to fruition through the colleges’ collaboration, according to Cynthia Jetter ’74, Director of Community Partnerships at the Lang Center and liaison between the access center and the council. “I’m so proud of [the college presidents’] ability to actually come together and form this entity, which they’ve now incorporated into a non-profit, that allows us to work together and go after funding and do so many more things than we could do individually,” Jetter said.

Jetter, who has been the driving force behind the center, explained that resources already in place at the colleges from previous mentorship programs provide the center with a good base from which to build. “I just couldn’t imagine all that information, all that knowledge and processing and understanding and training, gone to waste,” Jetter said. “This is the place we can put all that and still provide a much needed service to the community.”

These resources, combined with the demonstrated educational needs of the Chester community and Delaware County more largely, helped convince the council to take the center as its first project. “This just seemed like a good, quick, easy fit,” Jetter said.

According to Jetter, support from the Swarthmore College community for such a project has been enthusiastic and long-standing. “Every year we have freshmen coming in here wanting to start a program like this based on their experience,” she said. One such student, Sarah Ting ’10, is now Student Volunteer Coordinator for the center, organizing volunteer scheduling and outreach beginning with Swarthmore students and eventually extending to student volunteers from other institutions.

Ting first became interested in creating a project like the access center as a result of her experiences tutoring elementary school children in Chester.

“A lot of students didn’t have a real sense of where their education was taking them,” Ting said, expressing the hope that the center will help to make college a more realistic goal for such students.

Swarthmore has replied enthusiastically to calls for center volunteers, according to Ting. “I was really surprised and excited that we had so many people respond. It just shows how much people think this center is really necessary,” she said. Ting has heard from over 20 applicants since the beginning of the semester.

The necessity of the center is especially apparent to Jetter, who has first-hand experience having grown up in Chester. “The number of young people from the city of Chester that go on to college is lower than in our surrounding districts — significantly lower,” Jetter said, citing lack of information and wherewithal as two of the factors behind this. “A lot of folks in low income will just get stuck, and then the next crisis in their family comes up, and this [plans for college] has to get put to the side,” she said.

One of the main goals behind the center is to provide informational support and guidance for families like these. “It’s a great opportunity for people to have access to resources and information. That’s big when it comes to college accessibility,” said Erica Hawthorne, Program Assistant for the center.

“I have no doubt [the center] is going to be successful just because the need is there,” Jetter said, adding that while the original plans for the center would have placed its service area solely within Chester, additional work on the project suggests that the entire Delaware County has need of a college access center.

Meeting this need, however, involves more than catering to high school students looking to attend college, according to the center director Gwendolyn Atkinson-Miller.

“One of the goals of the center is to really try to help students who are not college material, who are not going to school. So I’m reaching out to all the technical training schools in Delaware County, and I’m inviting them to the center,” Atkinson-Miller said, explaining that “if not higher education, we can help some get training and skills to get employment.”

Jetter added that this also extends to adults looking to begin or resume their postsecondary education.

“If you’re forty years old, and you only went to college for one year, and you’re totally lost for how to get back on track – you can come to the center and get help,” she said.

Another important goal for the center is to engage the communities and students of Delaware County through creative new programs and outreach projects. “We’re looking for creative and innovative workshops, things that will really treat the interests of students – not just the normal kind of classroom experience,” Atkinson-Miller said.

In keeping with these aims, one Swarthmore student will be offering weekly tae kwon do classes at the center, and others are interested in starting a chess club. In addition, one Swarthmore volunteer has expressed an interest in developing a college preparation database for the center.

“I think we’ll have a lot of new and exciting projects coming to the center through Swarthmore students,” Ting said. “We haven’t fully realized that potential yet, but we’ll get there.”

Ting stressed the degree of opportunity available to volunteers this early on in the center’s presence. “We’re really at the beginning stages, so this is an exciting time for anyone to get involved. You can really get into the beginnings and the development of a lot of these programs which means that you get more of a say in how they develop,” she said.

What it also means is that the center is currently spending much of its resources getting the word out about the services it offers. “Our main goal right now is to make sure that we do enough marketing, public advertising, so that people know we’re here,” said Atkinson-Miller.

More generally, Atkinson-Miller said the center’s mission is to have a positive, direct impact its consumers. She said, “We hope that we can put the access center on the map, and people will be able to point to the center and say ‘they really made a difference in people’s lives.’”

Students interested in becoming more involved with the center can contact Sarah Ting at sting1@swarthmore.edu for a volunteer application or Erica Hawthorne at ehawtho1@swarthmore.edu for further information on the center.

Volunteers are accepted and trained on a rolling basis.

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