Nope Columbia, I claim the embarrassing title of the last to post. Sorry for the delay everybody but Wesleyan has an awkwardly long two week spring break that began before the first deadline and ended after the second. This is great from a student's perspective (2 weeks off!) but from in my official capacity as LGR site director, I'm a little worried that it might throw a kink in the attendance. At this point, we've only had two full weeks of class, so two weeks off is a lot. To compensate we're making sure to call all the kids individually and also putting in announcements at the two high schools we service. Hopefully it shouldn't be a problem.

This semester started off really crazy because of student recruitment issues, but now that we're settled it's looking to be a really good one. Our program ran last semester for the first time in Platt High School in Meriden, CT, and we ended up with a good group of kids - but this year, only 20 students showed up for the first meeting. We were pretty disappointed because we have a really strong crop of coaches this semester and it looked like we might have to turn some of them away because we didn't have enough students. But, in the Meriden school district there's another high school, Maloney, which we hadn't really reached out to yet. Jess made a few phone calls and was able to arrange us to do a last minute recruiting blitz at Maloney. We went into every 11th grade English classroom and gave 5-10 minute program pitches, and also canvassed during their lunch. In some classrooms, you'd just get blank stares - I don't envy high school teachers - but in most we got at least a couple of faces that were looking back at us and seemed really interested. After a lot of recruiting, it all payed off - we had 20-25 Meriden students show up for a class, and about 15 of them are sticking with the program. Now we've got a nice round number of students who are committed to the program, and we didn't need to turn any coaches away. In the future, I think we're going to try to get more hands on with recruiting. The school systems are so so supportive, but they just don't have the resources to do the kind of publicity blitz we need as a fledgling program. The classroom presentations work really well, so we'll try to use that as our main recruiting conduit from now on.

As for the classes themselves, they are going really well. We have a strong set of coaches, as I said, and a couple have proved really adept at working with the lower-performing group. The second diagnostic test results aren't in yet, but I feel pretty confident that the scores are going to move. We also have a group of higher performing students who came in with scores above 500 for every section. This group includes the son and daughter of two of the assistant principles at Platt, which has been pretty amusing. I hope they're telling their parents good things! As far as attendance, it's been pretty good, although as I said I'm worried about it dropping off after the break. I really liked the posterboard idea posted by BC, and we're going to try and implement something similar. We also finally got a donations coordinator who is going to go around to local businesses and try and get them to donate some gift certificates and the like. The Middletown community is pretty used to being hit up by Wesleyan students for money, and are usually pretty helpful.

We've got a lot of work to do before May 5th but I'm really optimistic. All the coaches in the program are working pretty hard and getting a lot out of their students.

-Malcolm and Cheryl