Nearly 100 GEAR UP Iowa partners from across the state gathered in central Iowa Monday, Aug. 5, for a full day of learning and engagement to prepare them to maximize GEAR UP Iowa's impact for the upcoming school year.

GEAR UP Iowa stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. It is a federally funded program that supports underserved students in preparing, enrolling and persisting through education after high school. The program, which received a $25.8 federal grant last fall, is administered by the Iowa Department of Education's Bureau of Iowa College Aid.

View additional photos from this event in this photo gallery.

In partnerships with local school districts, GEAR UP Iowa students and families receive services to prepare them academically, financially and inspirationally to enroll and succeed in postsecondary education.

Monday's Kick Off, hosted at Des Moines Area Community College's Ankeny Campus, brought together educators and administrators from the 13 GEAR UP Iowa districts as well as GEAR UP Iowa partners to strategize and learn from GEAR UP Iowa staff, experts from the Iowa Department of Education and a slew of educational facilitators to craft a full day of programming, networking and building for a successful 2024-25 school year.

The full day of sessions began with an enthusiastic welcome from DMACC president Rob Denson, who instantly challenged the attendees and teed up one of the biggest challenges facing those working within the GEAR UP Iowa program.

"We need you right now," Denson said. "Right now, 40 percent of Iowa high school graduates are not going on to college. As a native-born Iowan, with education always being so important, that is a shockingly large number."

GEAR UP Iowa aims to address that stark figure through its primary objectives to 
●    Identify the student barriers to higher education.
●    Facilitate the completion of a rigorous college preparatory curriculum.
●    Provide intensive academic and wrap-around support to students.
●    Implement activities to educate and inform Iowa families about the value of a postsecondary education.
●    Guide students and families through the college search, application and enrollment process.

GEAR UP Iowa staff presented on barriers to postsecondary education that students face and how GEAR UP Iowa programming and resources help overcome those hurdles and guide students in the face of those challenges. Years of data from prior cohorts was used to identify key GEAR UP metrics and areas of success those involved in the GEAR UP Iowa Future Ready and 3.0 cohorts can apply to achieve similar success.

"The big thing for me is getting into this mindset," said Clinton High School counselor Jeremiah Avise-Rouse of participating in the GEAR UP Iowa Kick Off. "It creates the space to garner new ideas and bounce ideas off other people."

Clinton High School has been part of every GEAR UP Iowa cohort, and facilitators such as Avise-Rouse manage multiple cohorts and use the tactics presented Monday to help manage transitions.

"We have Future Ready [cohort] right now at the high school with seniors," Avise-Rouse said. "Now I'm getting ready to pick up eighth graders who are going to be coming up to the high school next year. We are discussing some strategies and events that we could plan that would help with that and going back to square one."

To help facilitate reconnecting with new students and cohorts, GEAR UP Iowa staff leaned on experts in facilitating skills-based learning, youth development and agile learning.

ArtForce Iowa demonstrated how art can be used to connect, interact and communicate with students, especially those who may struggle to express their thoughts and emotions through traditional means.

"This session was to show them [GEAR UP Iowa] a glimpse of how they can interact with young people in the classroom when it comes to doing art and then focusing on finding out more about their moods as well as recognizing and regulating their moods," ArtForce Iowa Heros Program Director Claudia Kyalangalilwa said. "Then also discussing about how important it is to talk about shared values and be authentic with each other as we share those values. We use art because art is a language that everybody understands."

Jayne Jeffries, the Director of Community Youth Concepts' Stowe Height Challenge Course led GEAR UP Iowa partners through a series of exercises and activities they can employ with students and staff to work as a team to accomplish goals and learn valuable information about themselves, each other and as a group.

The Iowa Authentic Learning Network's Laura Williams also provided an invigoration session on creating Agile Classrooms. A Certified Scrum Master, Williams guided the session through Agile principles and how they develop 21st-century skills and cross-strength teams for productive collaboration in the classroom.

In addition to outside experts, GEAR UP Iowa utilized the expertise and experience of their colleagues within the Iowa Department of Education to help prepare GEAR UP Iowa partners for the upcoming school year. Erica Wood-Schmitz, an academic and career planning consultant, detailed how to integrate GEAR UP Iowa framework plans with state requirements, while April Pforts, a mathematics consultant from the Bureau of Learner Strategies and Supports, provided an update on state math standards. Connor Hood and Greg Feldmann from the Bureau of School Improvement also shared how GEAR UP Iowa schools and districts can use the Iowa Department of Education's Panorama platform to build whole-child support systems and ensure students are prepared for postsecondary education and career opportunities.

"We have a partnership with Eastern Iowa Community College, which helps us facilitate our GEAR UP Iowa program," said Lisa Baxter, Davenport Community Schools' GEAR UP Director. "So they're here, too, because we all have these mutual goals of school-to-college awareness, and having them here provides a bit of time for us to network and receive new information from the state on how to achieve these goals."

GEAR UP Iowa staff also helped those, like Baxter, who are responsible for carrying out the day-to-day functions of GEAR UP Iowa programming, fine-tune the administrative aspects of their program with sessions on budgets, claims and matches to maximize the impact GEAR UP Iowa funds have on their districts while reviewing policies and how to utilize the quarterly data reports all GEAR UP Iowa districts receive. Members of the Bureau of Iowa College Aid's community engagement division also highlighted other resources within the division that can assist GEAR UP Iowa's efforts.

"This is a necessary time to touch base, and I appreciate GEAR UP Iowa adding a finance session," Baxter said. "There's a lot of tedious stuff that goes on with federal grants. So we were able to bring our accounting representative, which was just fabulous. We could learn about the claims, the matching, and all that associated with the grant. So that's really, really important and awesome."

Baxter notes that combining those educators, administrators and professionals from various levels of the college-going process is critical to GEAR UP Iowa's success for the upcoming 2024-25 school year and well into the future.

"Every one of these topics has been just right on point," Baxter said. "Everything that GEAR UP Iowa is giving us with information is so relevant to our shared goals. Whether it's graduation rates, getting kids to attend college, or layering in Panorama with the data tools around, that is really well done every year. I think they continue to better understand the needs of the schools and bring that to this conference."