Hello from New Haven!

As most of you know, this is LGR's first summer in New Haven, and we feel very proud of how things are going. It was difficult recruiting people at first considering the fact that we are a summer program running for the first time and started really getting in to high schools the week before they had finals, but we are excited to say we have a program of about 35 students with 7 verbal coaches, 8 math coaches, and several helpful college choice coaches. I will explain college chioce coaches, because I don't believe all programs have them. We received many applications from people who wanted to help as coaches, but couldn't be full time coaches for different reasons (mostly low SAT scores). We did not want to discourage them from helping with the program, so we invite them to come on college choice nights and help share experiences with the students and help with activities.
Although our last class only had 21 students attend, there was a storm and many families were concerned with letting the students come to LGR. Many of our students also called us to let us know they weren't coming and why.
We had a slight miscommunication with one of the people from our site because we didn't realize to what extent he was involved with out program, but we scheduled a weekly meeting where we can meet with him and our site partner and go over things. He has been extremely helpful since and a great resource.
A few exciting things are going on. For one, we just gave out our first set of prizes for attendance. In our program, we made each class a "team" and had them make a team name for themselves. They compete as teams for things such as best attendacne, highest SAT improvement, and on different college choice activities where applicable. We found the average attendance percentage for each class so far in this ongoing competition. This past week we told them who is in first place, second place, etc. and the students wanted to know who in their class had misses the most days. They then were saying things such as "Hey! Why didn't you come!" and "You better start getting here so we can win!", which was the exact response we were looking for and hope the peer pressure makes those who have been missing class start coming.
Another exciting thing is our college trip. Thing were not looking so good for a while as far as our college trip because all of students have such different schedules. The only time everyone could have the opportunity to go would be at night and let's face it, what college is going to give a group of students a tour at night? Well, thanks to Emily the University of New Haven is! We actually had someone offer to give us a tour of their campus at 6:00pm, the time we normally have classes and students can come.
The last exciting event that I will talk about (not exciting event, but last one I will talk about) is our financial aid session coming up. We have scheduled a night for a speaker to come in to go over financial aid. The students are already aware of this date, but Emily and Lauren will be working on inviting family members to make sure they are involved in this important workshop.
Overall, things are going rather well. We definintely have our challenges as any program does, but in general we are pleased with the way things are going. Our main goal now, aside obviously planning our future activities, is to make sure the students who are strong participants remain that way and to motivate those who are starting to lose interest. We are doing this by constantly calling students when they are out (in addition to their coaches calling them) and calling students to remind them of upcoming events such as diagnostic testing. When students are in class we remind them how glad we are to see them, what a great job they are doing, etc. Hopefully things we continue to go as well as, if not better than, they have been going.