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HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — As the future rises up to greet her, Atesha Gifford has options.
Atlanta. Austin, Texas. Maybe even return to Hartford for a job.
These are the opportunities that the daughter of Jamaican immigrants says she owes to Hartford Youth Scholars, the nonprofit that recruited her as a precocious middle-schooler from the city's North End, steered her to boarding school in Simsbury, then kept close tabs as she spent the last four years in sunny Florida, working toward a bachelor's degree in marketing.
The nearly decade-long investment is coming full circle. Gifford, as a 12-year-old, told The Courant in the summer of 2007: "I'm trying to break the chain in my family, a chain of high school dropouts."
Gifford, now 21, graduated from the University of Miami last month.
"My philosophy in life is that everyone is the product of the kindness and generosity of those around them," she said. "Without this program, I doubt I'd be where I am right now."
It's not just Gifford. This year, 11 of 30 students in Hartford Youth Scholars' inaugural class, known in the city's college-prep circles as "Cohort 1," are getting their diplomas from institutions such as Trinity College, Howard University and Smith College — for many, becoming the first in their families to earn a college degree, officials said.
Eight more students from the original group are set to graduate in the next two years.
They reunited at the program's June 3 fundraising gala in downtown Hartford, young men and women now old enough to sip a glass of wine. In middle school they sacrificed Saturdays, summers and more hours of sleep than they can count to get through the program's Steppingstone Academy, an academic and life-skills boot camp of extra classes, test prep, and lessons on social mores.
"This is the first time that we can actually say, 'Mission accomplished,'" said Anthony Byers, 31, co-executive director of Hartford Youth Scholars. He first met the students of Cohort 1 when they were seventh-graders, soon to be in eighth, and he was fresh out of UConn.
"We were kind of selling them a pipe dream," Byers said. "A lot of people in their family were saying, 'Go to college,' but they hadn't done it. ... Obviously, it's not the end, but for the first time we can say that we did what we set out to do."
In the beginning, the pitch seemed like a strange proposition.
Gifford remembered being in seventh grade at Sarah J. Rawson School in the city's Blue Hills neighborhood when Timothy Goodwin, the program's first executive director, talked to her and a few classmates that teachers had handpicked for their potential.
The push for Hartford Youth Scholars, initially founded by city leaders as a scholarship initiative in 2005, wasn't to pluck star students on a sure path to higher education. Modeled after a similar Steppingstone Academy in Boston, Goodwin and others focused on another segment of Hartford talent — intriguing "B'' students without a family history of college. Pre-teens like Gifford who could use a lift.
"The students were wondering, 'Who is this guy? What is this program?' So we really had to make sure that it was something they would want to do," Goodwin recalled earlier this month. "We let them know that it wasn't just about academics. It was working with their families, helping them become better people so they could be successful no matter where they land."
One thing Goodwin said dangled like a diamond necklace. He told them it was possible to attend high school outside of Hartford's stressed neighborhood schools, perhaps even prestigious private schools on leafy campuses that were a quick car ride away but seemed a world apart.
Until that moment, Gifford said, she had never considered the possibility. "I thought it was a TV thing, boarding school with amazing campuses and all these resources," she said. "But he came in and told me that everything I thought wasn't real, did exist" — right here in Connecticut — "and that I had an opportunity to be involved with it."
The program guides students through the prep-school application process, helping them secure financial aid at institutions that cost more than some universities. The plan always was to keep tabs on the students, even after their applications were approved and they went off to their freshman years.
Tahara Jordan admits that she was skeptical, even borderline hostile, when her mother escorted her for an interview. Jordan had been attending a north Hartford school and, as stubborn as ever, she wanted her summers off.
"Mr. Goodwin was like, 'So, why do you want to join the program?'" Jordan, 21, recounted. "I tell him, 'Because my mom said so.' I was not having it. He was trying to give me a million reasons, he was like, these are the benefits to it. He was telling me about college. ... My mom kind of started crying during the interview, like, 'I really want this for her, please.'"
At one point, Goodwin said, he grabbed photos of his kids and a basketball team he was coaching to show to Jordan, "trying to get her to see I was a real person."
"You could see that she had the spark," he said, "so I didn't want to let her go."
In 2007, the program accepted 31 students for its first cohort, including Jordan, a girl that Roxanna Booth Miller, Hartford Youth Scholars' other co-executive director, still remembers as "feisty." One student never showed up for Steppingstone. The program then lost a handful of scholars after the first summer, a hard lesson that more mentoring was needed to battle students' self-doubt and dwindling motivation, Booth Miller said.
Several more members of Cohort 1 eventually moved out of state or otherwise dropped off the radar, she said. The remaining 19 scholars are in the college orbit, either graduating this year or taking classes toward their degrees.
Reading Homer's "Odyssey" and deconstructing algebraic equations were part of their Steppingstone training years ago. Along with summer classes and extra instruction during the regular school year came team projects, presentations and tutoring.
"I was very rebellious, always had an opinion," Jordan said of her younger self. "But I got my work done. ... So I feel like that's how I survived."
There were nights when Gifford wouldn't get home until 11 p.m., riding two buses from Trinity College, where Hartford Youth Scholars is given classroom space rent-free, to her North End neighborhood. And then she'd start her homework from Rawson.
"I never thought it wasn't worth it," Gifford said.
Reykelis Rosario, 22, knew right away that Youth Scholars was good for him. At West Middle School in Hartford's Asylum Hill, he said, all he needed to do was "show up and behave."
Showing up wasn't enough in Steppingstone. The program enforced strict homework rules and issued slips if assignments weren't complete; six slips and a scholar could get kicked out. In his first week, Rosario said, he received four. It became a powerful motivator.
Before Steppingstone, Rosario said: "I was under the impression that I was one of the best. I had to prove to myself that I belonged there."
Celymarie Diaz also remembers the late nights, the test-prep vocabulary words that read like a foreign language. But soon she realized that the program had prepared her in other, crucial ways.
Diaz went from Naylor School in the South End, sitting alongside other students of Puerto Rican heritage, to being a true minority at the privileged, private Watkinson School on the northwestern edge of Hartford. Diaz, 22, a recent University of Hartford graduate, said it took some coaching to prepare for that shift.
Byers tells students they're always making an impression, whether they intend to or not, so they need the "armor" to navigate most social situations. Learning table manners — knowing to pass the salt and pepper shakers together, for instance — are part of the etiquette lessons at Hartford Youth Scholars. Firm handshakes, making eye contact and projecting one's voice are frequent tips.
In February, the program's well-dressed eighth-graders, from schools like Noah Webster MicroSociety Magnet School and the Jumoke Academy charter school in Hartford, were treated to dinner and theater, a special evening showing of "Romeo & Juliet" at Hartford Stage. It wasn't just a night out on the town. It was a training run.
Not to say it wasn't a jarring transition from inner-city Hartford schools to the stone-paved institutions that opened their doors. Gifford went from Rawson to Westminster School in Simsbury, "a complete 180 to where I'm one of eight black people in the class," she said. "It was the definition of culture shock."
After West Middle, Rosario attended the all-boys Avon Old Farms, adjusting to coats and ties and "academic rigor through the roof."
"While I was in there it felt like jail," said Rosario, who won a persistence award as a graduating senior. "Now that I'm out, I wish I could go back."
Jordan also went to boarding school on scholarship: Ethel Walker in Simsbury, which she still loves. Now a pre-med student at Florida A&M University, she is set to get her bachelor's degree in August.
"This program is real," Jordan said. "It changes lives, and we're a product of that."
Byers' cellphone is like the program's Rolodex, filled with phone numbers of a decade's worth of scholars recruited from churches, community groups, informational fairs, and "any middle school in Hartford that'll open its door to us," he said.
Hartford Youth Scholars, now working with 215 students, relies on donations to support a full-time staff of seven. The newest crop, soon-to-be seventh-graders in Cohort 11, report to the summer academy on Monday.
"At 12 years old I just didn't want to be a part of Steppingstone," Brittany Rodriguez, 21, told a ballroom full of donors, supporters and students on June 3. She graduated with honors from Pace University in New York last month. "As someone who once pleaded to exit the program and fought it each step of the way," she said, "I am more grateful than ever that no one in HYS ever gave up on me."
Hartford eighth-grader Alejandra Velasquez, headed to Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, credited her predecessors in her own speech that night: "I am determined to be a college graduate — your example will help push me toward that goal."
Rosario remains on his college journey. He enrolled at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire after Avon Old Farms, the first in his family to attend a four-year college, but felt unmoored after losing the prep-school structure he had grown to appreciate and even crave.
"No one was going to knock on my door if I didn't wake up for that 8 o'clock class," Rosario said. "No one was going to tell me, 'Laundry day is on Wednesday, you should get ready on Tuesday.' I had to really find that in me, that voice. That was something I struggled with, but I learned from it and I'm just ready for anything."
After two years at Capital Community College in Hartford — balancing a full-time job with part-time studies — Rosario is finishing up his associate's degree. He's now deciding between two state universities, Eastern and Central Connecticut State, and thinking of teaching someday. Giving back to students, showing them they have the ability to reach their goals, is important to him.
"My biggest lesson from the program was that even if I struggled, I could accomplish something," Rosario said. "That concept wasn't on my mind before that."
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Information from: Hartford Courant, http://www.courant.com
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