Virginia schools awarded funds to get kids to college

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Schools throughout Virginia will get $6.2 million in federal funding for applications designed to assist underserved college students entry increased schooling.

The funding will go to help Upward Certain applications, which assist put together “low-income and first-generation highschool college students” as they undergo the school software course of.

“All college students deserve entry to the sources they should succeed,” Virginia senators Tim Kaine (D) and Mark Warner (D) wrote in a joint assertion. “This represents one other crucial funding in leveling the enjoying discipline so that extra college students have the instruments to succeed in their objectives and prepare for all times after highschool.”

Recipients in Central Virginia embody Virginia Union College in Richmond and Virginia State College in Ettrick.

VSU’s program, which acquired $451,377, serves the cities of Hopewell and Petersburg, in addition to 4 surrounding counties. The funding will go in the direction of “summer season residential applications.”

VUU received $444,616 for “Saturday supplementary schooling, summer season residential parts, and Individualized Tutorial Plan creation,” which serves Richmond’s 5 excessive colleges.

Senators Warner and Kaine, alongside dozens of others, referred to as for this system to obtain a funding enhance in a letter despatched final July to the subcommittee in command of funding the Division of Schooling.

However whereas Kaine and Warner celebrated the grants, some advocacy teams stated the funding wasn’t sufficient.

“Whereas the three.8% enhance for [the program] is a step in the appropriate route, it’s, nonetheless, a disappointment,” the Council for Alternative in Schooling wrote in March.

That 3.8% enhance is unlikely to permit the growth of Upward Certain applications to new colleges, and, given the excessive price of inflation, might barely be sufficient to permit the establishments to keep up their present choices.