Transitioning from middle school to high school can be daunting for any student. Fortunately, Abilene ISD has numerous resources and positive supports in place to make that move smoother for all students. One of those opportunities took place in late May, with a group of nearly 50 incoming high school students.
Before the 2007-08 school year, the Abilene Education Foundation placed a full-time college advisor at each AISD high school campus to work alongside high school counselors. The Shelton Family Foundation funds the “College Offers Opportunities for Life” (COOL) counselors, who assist underserved students or those who will be the first in their families to attend college. They also help students with financial aid, college applications, and campus visits.
The Dian Graves Owen Foundation helped add two more COOL counselors before the 2012-13 school year, and the additional personnel has helped thousands of AISD students make a smoother transition into high school and college.
The AEF expanded the reach of its COOL program in 2013 with the establishment of Camp COOL. The counselors wanted to introduce eighth-graders to the COOL program, get them thinking about their future, and help them transition from middle school to high school.
The COOL counselors took selected eighth-graders to a camp in Brownwood, but had to adjust the format and took the group to Dallas and Waco in the two years before COVID hit. After the pandemic, the group again had to pivot, which led to a new camp this year: COOL Prep.
COOL Program Coordinator Amanda Wiskow and the COOL Counselor Kate Ashby worked with the four middle school principals to select a cohort of 12 students from each campus to track over the next five years and help prepare them for college. If all goes well with the program, those counselors will monitor five classes of eighth through 12th graders (more than 200 students) at once in the next few years.
“We asked the principals at the middle schools to identify kids who might need a little more attention and some intentional meetings as they prepare for the transition to ninth grade and begin thinking about college,” said Amanda Wiskow, COOL program coordinator for AEF. “We wanted kids that might have shown leadership potential, but haven’t had the opportunity to shine. ”
COOL counselors Ashby, Tamika Braye (Abilene High School), and Gerald Wilkerson (Cooper High School) met monthly with students at each of the four middle schools – Wiskow at Mann, Ashby at Clack, Braye at Craig, and Wilkerson at Madison – discussing the importance of time management, goal-setting, high school GPA, and getting involved in extracurricular activities in high school.
Those 48 students and four counselors capped the year with a two-day trip to the Metroplex for fun, mixed with team-building and bonding exercises, at Group Dynamix in Carrollton. The group started the day of May 29 at McMurry University with a tour to let the students see what a college campus looks like, some icebreakers, and get-to-know-you exercises before loading buses and heading east.
While at Group Dynamix, the counselors saw the students come out of their shells, walls break down, and friendships begin to be formed within the group. Watching those students interact was the culmination of a year’s worth of work for the COOL counselors.
“The best part of the two days was sitting back and watching the fruits of our labor because they were interacting and talking with each other, playing games, and being kids,” Ashby said. “Sometimes eighth-graders forget to be kids because they want to be adults. So they’re trying to be cool and act a certain way. But during those two days, they weren’t on their phones, they were meeting other people, finding things they had in common, and they got to be kids without any stress. Watching that play out was special.”
Wiskow and Ashby said they want the students in the cohort to leave the COOL Prep program with greater confidence and ready for what the high school setting will be like.
“They’ve been the top dogs in middle school for a year, and now they’re going to bigger campuses with bigger kids, more people, and more things,” Ashby said. “We hope these kids are more comfortable and confident entering high school. The COOL Prep program intends to ensure they aren’t blindsided by what’s to come on a high school campus. We want them to get to high school more confident in themselves than in middle school.”
