UNI programming lays the foundation for a successful path forward for students long before they may be considering their next steps beyond high school.
On a recent weekday, pool noodles, hula-hoops and foam balls covered the stage of the Black Box Theatre at the University of Northern Iowa campus. Pairs of Waterloo high school students, one blindfolded and one not, were trying to cross the floor without touching anything - one student guiding their blindfolded partner with verbal instructions.
The air was alive with laughter, good-natured groans during the team-building workshop, part of a new partnership between UNI’s Department of Theatre and its Classic Upward Bound program that seeks to prepare low-income and first-generation Waterloo high school students for college. For program directors, the workshops are a way to expose students to important skills beyond just textbook knowledge.
U.S. Sen. Joni Enrst received a first-hand look last week at how a University of Northern Iowa program is helping low-income Cedar Valley students gain access to and succeed in higher education, while also learning how the program is growing to help more people.
The event Thursday at UNI’s Center for Urban Education (better known as UNI-CUE), which recently signed another 10-year-lease for it’s downtown Waterloo headquarters, brought attention to the broad range of programs on offer. Ernst met with UNI President Mark A. Nook, UNI-CUE Executive Director Robert Smith, UNI-CUE Assistant Director Megan Holbach, Educational Opportunity Center Assistant Director Nickole Dillard and two UNI students, Brianna Nash and Audrey Dillavou, who have used UNI-CUE’s programs.
Sisters Angela and Gina Weekley know their lives could have turned out differently.
They grew up in Waterloo, in a single-parent, low-income home where no one held even a high school level education. But they credited TRIO, a federal program administered by the University of Northern Iowa that provides services for elementary through high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds, with helping them overcome those obstacles and build successful careers and become local leaders and pillars of their community, with both being named to the Waterloo Courier’s 20 Under 40 list.
“Statistically, I should not be having this conversation with you,” Angela, currently the community inclusion manager at Veridian Credit Union and the oldest of the three Weekley siblings who all went through UNI’s Educational Talent Search and upward Bound programs, said. “The TRIO programs not only changed my life, but allowed me to model for my younger siblings.”
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