Community health sophomore Wendolyne Tamayo said she’s glad to have been a part of the Upward Bound Program at Brownsville’s Rivera High School.
“It really did help a lot during high school, but it did help prepare me for college a lot,” Tamayo said by telephone Oct. 26 from Texas A&M University in College Station. “Especially right now that whenever I need advice or I need help or any other resources, I still have contact with the advisers and a tutor. I just give them a call and they help out a lot.”
Upward Bound at Rivera High School is one of 16 programs whose funding has been renewed for five years, thanks to UTRGV’s College Access Outreach Programs, which obtained more than $25 million in grants for Educational Talent Search, Upward Bound and Upward Bound Math and Science programs at middle and high schools from Rio Grande City to Port Isabel, as well as the College Assistance Migrant and Veterans Upward Bound programs at UTRGV.
These programs serve 3,028 students, giving them an opportunity to attend an institution of higher education and assistance beyond their first year in college.
Beatriz Becerra-Barckholtz is executive director of UTRGV’s College Access Outreach Programs, overseeing 19 federal grants. She and her team began writing the grant proposals in February 2016 and submitted them in June 2017.
Although UTRGV is the host for these grant programs, the university is “not necessarily recruiting these students to come to UTRGV,” Becerra-Barckholtz said. “What we are doing with these grants is preparing students to go into postsecondary education, no matter where.”
The grants allow Student Educational Outreach to expand its services for students in areas such as Willacy and Starr counties and continue to serve Cameron and Hidalgo counties, said Sylvia Leal, UTRGV’s associate vice president for Student Educational Outreach.
“We’re always on the lookout for grants that can help us meet and fulfill our purpose,” Leal said. “Right now, our primary focus is to address some of the underserved areas that we have in the Valley: Port Isabel, Lyford, Raymondville, Rio Grande City. [They] were some of our targets for expanding the services we’re already offering in Brownsville, Edinburg and the mid-Valley.”
Becerra-Barckholtz said she and her team of writers, consisting of the directors of grant programs, would work after 5 p.m. and during the weekends because U.S. Education Department policy does not allow directors of these programs to assist in the grant writing between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.
“We had to work a lot of long hours, after 8, and a lot of very long, long weekends,” she said. “But we knew that and we were OK with that, so we went ahead and did it. They helped me, they were a big part … in helping getting data from the schools. They were writing some of the sections, they were editing some of the sections. Again, each proposal was 65 pages long, so we needed to make sure each proposal met all the standards and requirements from [the] Department of Education.”
On May 31, Becerra-Barckholtz and her team were told they received nine Upward Bound grants, five more than the four existing grants.
“You don’t understand, we were, like, over the moon because we didn’t know or didn’t think that it was going to be possible to get all nine,” she said. “I mean, we were very hopeful, but in the back of our [minds] we’re like, ‘It might be not likely that we’ll get all nine of them.’ We knew for sure that we were going to get the existing [grants], which were four, but then the five new [grants]. It’s always just a shot in the dark even though we presented really good data.”
Becerra-Barckholtz said receiving this number of Upward Bound grants has never happened before in legacy institutions UT Brownsville or UT Pan American.
Two of the grants, the College Assistance Migrant Program and Veterans Upward Bound, assist students attending UTRGV.
CAMP helps 45 students on each campus every year with housing, books, transportation, food and childcare.
“Once a student gets into the CAMP program … there’s no way that the student could not be successful their first year because everything is provided to them,” Becerra-Barckholtz said. “The only thing that’s part of that equation we can’t control is their ganas [desire] to be successful their first year. Everything else, we give them. We provide mentoring, we provide tutoring, monthly meetings, food, everything they could possibly need.”
Kristin Croyle, vice president for Student Success, said obtaining the grants was a team effort.
“We have some excellent staff in our Student Educational Outreach area, as well as support from our colleagues that support grants throughout the institution and at the same time our educational partners [school districts] in the Valley,” Croyle said. “For each grant that we prepared, that we worked on, we had to have educational partners that were fully prepared to … partner with us to support their students. It’s both the staff in our institution and the staff and teachers in the local school districts that these grants will be serving.
She also credited the Valley’s legislators in Washington, D.C.
“These are federally funded grants and it’s very helpful that our legislators continue to keep in mind the educational needs of the Valley in supporting funding for programs like these,” Croyle said.
The grants are awarded to universities every five years.
“If we didn’t write this time, we would have waited for the next cycle to become available, which would have been in 2022,” Becerra-Barckholtz said.
Among the many grants College Access Outreach Programs has, the Upward Bound grants have been in existence for 45 years in Edinburg and 20 years in Brownsville.
“The years are very important to understanding that these grants are not just a one-time thing where you just write [those] grants and ‘Oh, you have them for life,’” she said. “But it’s about understanding that every year the Department of Education holds us accountable to meeting all the objectives of the grants and if we’re not meeting them, it’s unlikely that we receive them.”
In addition to these grants, Leal said the department is on the lookout for more grants to expand in underserved areas.
“Our job is to go out there and help them expand and enhance the work they’re already doing by helping to create pathways for the students, help students understand through our advising, through our workshops that we do with parents and students and to really help the school districts maybe come up with innovative ideas on how to create better pathways for students to college,” she said.
Becerra-Barckholtz said her passion for what she does comes from being a first-generation college student, much like the students the grants assist.
“I have witnessed firsthand how [the grants] affect our students,” she said. “I think that our South Texas Rio Grande Valley community’s high schools are in such great need that I want to be able to do everything that I can in my position here at UTRGV to bring those opportunities for us because I feel I’m just one of many people who should be fighting for these opportunities for them.”
Tamayo said she uses the skills Upward Bound taught her in high school for college.
“They did prepare me in a big way for college, especially with, like, the environment, what to experience, [and] how difficult it was gonna be,” she said. “They give us a lot of tips, study skills, and it’s actually helped a lot here. I still carry it with me.”
