Student Publicity at GWHS LGR

The LGR program at the George Washington High School Campus in New York (192nd Street) is under-enrolled at this point. Approximately 29 students applied but only 12 attended the first day. Given that probably 5-15+ applicants are not truly committed to participating in the program, as few as a dozen students are likely, at this point, to be very active participants.

I am going up to the school today and tomorrow to speak with students individually and in their classes and get more to participate. To help me with the publicity work, I have recruited two high school students from last semester’s LGR program at GWHS; they have volunteered to talk about LGR during classroom presentations.

Teachers and administrators at the high schools that comprise the GWHS Campus have already done an incredible amount of publicity. At the High School for Health Careers, an English teacher has been postering and talking the program up by speaking in 11th grade classrooms. At the High School for Media and Communications, the college counselor, who has “guarantee[d] 10” of his students participating, mentioned LGR at an assembly and has been talking with students individually. At the HS for Law and Public Service, the program has been publicized in English classrooms, with one student saying that he’s heard about the program “repeated times.”

I don’t expect that my work will yield an incredible amount of new applications, but I imagine that it will yield at least a few. With more than 350 juniors in the three high schools at GWHS with which LGR has contracted, Jennifer (Site Director), Vanessa (Co-Director for CC), and I want to believe that more than a dozen can be truly committed to and fully able to participate in an LGR program.

We have hope because the Cornell LGR program, which had 8 students at their first program meeting, expects close to 30 for tonight’s class. Yeah!