INTRODUCTORY NOTES
I’m walking with HEOP Student Manny Salazar from the Bronx through the long carpeted hallways of Sykes. I can see his hands constantly running over the fabric of his shorts, intensifying as we get closer to the loud murmur of Sykes Formal. I can tell that there’s something making butterflies spin in his stomach.
“How do I approach somebody? Or how do they approach me?” Manny asks. “That’s always what I’m most nervous about… Who am I going to meet?”
I smile. As a HEOP student myself, it’s moments like these that make me realize the importance of what HEOP does. Instead of nervously pacing around a dining hall wondering where to sit, Manny’s experience at his first HEOP dinner went a tad bit differently.
He met with faculty and administrators from numerous departments across the St. Lawrence University directory. He met some of his fellow classmates also going through the motions of adjusting to a new environment. He even met with Mo Tunkara, a fellow HEOP alumni that came from the very same high school over 400 miles away in NYC.
HEOP’S IMPORTANCE
These connections go a long way for students like Manny, Bill Short says. Short is the Director for the Higher Education Opportunity Program at St. Lawrence University. He says HEOP is more than just a meet and greet – but rather a program that began as a call for change following the peak of the Civil Rights Movement.
“By 1969, The HEOP was authorized by the (NYS) legislature, with the work of Martin Luther King Jr. centered behind it,” Short said. “It was people who knew him and were a part of that team that came up with a concept – providing academic support, financial support and personal support to people who would not otherwise have the opportunity to get into and thrive in a higher-ed environment.”
Students who come to St. Lawrence through HEOP come from severely under-represented, low-income areas around New York State. The cards life has dealt them make it nearly impossible to focus solely on academic development. Their attention is on everyday life problems that drain physical and emotional energy.
For HEOP students, coming to college marks a major transition. For the first time, they are removed from their lives and given five weeks to acclimate. They immediately get placed into an academically rigorous program, where outside distractions are toned down so that they can simply focus. Courses such as Philosophy and Gender Studies are condensed from their usual 15 weeks down into a quickly-paced 35 days, placing an entire semester’s worth of work into the single month of July.
OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
The work demands long and tiring study sessions, but as Assistant Director Erin Colvin says that it’s not just academics that her students are doing while they’re here.
“We incorporate a service seminar piece so that they can talk about their service and make it meaningful,” Colvin said.
They volunteer with organizations such as the Campus Kitchens Project and the Free Will Meal Program, agencies that are focused around food insecurity as an issue that bridges across urban and rural divides.
“Our students come from places where they’re relying on meals at school, meals from their community, meals from their church,” she said. “And so then seeing that where they’re coming from and where they’re here now, that there are similarities to the people of the Canton community as well.”
As we left his first dinner on campus, Manny told me that the summer program for him is an important reassurance – a reminder that there is a path beyond the broken cycle back home. A path that 50 years of HEOP Students before him have marked for him.
“It makes me a lot more comfortable knowing that people from my school are able to get into St. Lawrence University. A lot of people are from Brooklyn – I’m from the Bronx,” Manny said.
“I have a few students that are from the Bronx, and that sort of made it a little more comfortable, but coming into a whole new area, that made it into a little shock to me,” he continues. “Just knowing that there’s people that go through the same experiences I do – they’re here in St. Lawrence as well. If he’s cool with people here, if he’s comfortable here, then I can as well.”
The cultural differences and stereotypical assumptions made against its students aren’t the only thing HEOP battles against. Funding for the program is a constant debate within chambers of the New York State Legislature.
Student Advocacy Days and exposure to the program for thousands across the state are just part of the battle to fulfill the program’s initial promise. A promise, many within HEOP tell me, that is more than worth fighting for.