Anoka-Hennepin school hopes day at U sparks college dreams

Coon Rapids Middle School's eighth-graders -- all 450 of them -- switch schools Friday.

It's a vertical move. They're boarding 10 buses and spending the day at the University of Minnesota. U alumnus and Anoka-Hennepin schools Superintendent Dennis Carlson is going with them.

The idea is to give the kids, who attend the middle school with the highest poverty rate in the district, a thorough soaking in college campus ambience and a sense that college could be in the cards for their future. While hard data are not available, it's likely that the notion of going to college is a foreign one for many of the eighth-graders headed for the U on Friday.

A quarter of the students at the school, which has a 38 percent poverty rate, are racial minorities, and increasing numbers of non-English-speaking kids are showing up for class.

"Of those [450] students, many have never experienced a college campus," said Peggy Schierl, one of the school's counselors. "Many come from homes where college was not an experience of their parents, and they have never looked ahead to what their options may be after high school."

It's an issue not just at Coon Rapids Middle School.

"In our seven-county metro area, Anoka [County] has the least number of adults with four-year college diplomas," Carlson said. "It's slightly under 17 percent. What we need are examples and symbols of high expectations for students. We're trying to make sure students see this as an attainable goal, and make the context comfortable for them."

"Typical field trips might involve going to a museum, and we wanted to do something a little different and academically focused, and something students might not normally have an opportunity to do," Tauer said.

This year's visit grew out of Tauer's Excel program, which is aimed at "students who have been identified with academic potential who are underperforming, their grades weren't matching their potential." She took 35 students, including her Excel eighth-graders and a contingent of seventh-graders, to visit the U last fall as part of the U's Kids on Campus program. The tour was such a hit that the school decided to expand it to the entire eighth grade.

Several area colleges and universities -- including Bethel, Augsburg, Hamline and Concordia -- were contacted about hosting the tour and showed interest, but the size of the eighth-grade group proved too daunting, Schierl said. Ultimately, the U proved to be the best fit. But a visit also came with expenses, mostly to run the buses that will take the kids to and from the campus. The school got a $500 grant from the Anoka-Hennepin district, and the U kicked in the remaining $2,500, Tauer said.

This week's visit is creating a stir, she said.

"We already have a buzz," Tauer said. "Kids are asking me, 'Are we really going to the U?' "