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From Minnesota to Akron: Margaret Tulay Engages with Kenmore-Garfield
High School Students through Akron Promise’s Student Success Team

by Jeanne-Hélène Roy

Just five years ago, if you’d have mentioned Kenmore to Minnesota native
Margaret Tulay, she wouldn’t have been able to readily identify the reference –
beyond perhaps a brand of appliances sold by Sears. Since then, the University
of Akron education major slated to graduate in December has become a fixture
of Kenmore-Garfield High School (KGHS) where, through her work with Akron
Promise’s Student Success Team (SST), she regularly interacts with Kenmore’s
high schoolers, guiding them to post-secondary pathways and self-sufficiency.

Tulay moved to Akron after having kicked off her college career in Omaha, where she served as goalkeeper for the University of Nebraska women’s soccer team. After experiencing some setbacks there, Tulay, 22, whose father hails from Liberia, chose to continue her degree in Akron to experience living in a more racially diverse area as a means of more authentically connecting with her Black identity. Thanks to the University of Akron’s EX[L] Center’s experiential learning internship program, which strives to help students become locally engaged leaders, Tulay hooked up with Akron Promise two and a half years ago.

In the SST’s bi-monthly meetings with KGHS students, Tulay harnesses her natural sense of leadership to connect with the group, challenging them to identify their personal strengths and goals as well as to devise better time management strategies. Self-assured yet relaxed in her approach, Tulay devises well-crafted activities that prompt students to engage with each other, teaching them invaluable teamwork skills that they can readily transfer to their next chapter of life, whatever it may be.

Tulay relishes the opportunities Akron Promise affords her, especially at KGHS, where she’s able to make meaningful connections with the student cohort, many of whom can identify with her as a young Black woman – a role model not significantly older than they are. In the short term, Tulay hopes to work in the
Akron area, both teaching special needs children and assisting in “taking Akron Promise and making it mobile,” as she remarks, meaning that she’d like to help the non-profit expand to serve more students across the city. In a handful of years, Tulay envisions living in a townhouse in Washington, D.C., where
she can take her career aspirations to the next level, both in the classroom and in effecting change at the policy level.

Akron Promise is a non-profit organization that strives to shape and implement a community-involved culture of education in Akron. Along with other local stakeholders, Akron Promise directs students and families to appropriate opportunities, resources, and supports as it mentors Akron Public School students through high school into post-secondary pathways.

Akron Promise’s Student Success Team currently focuses on
Kenmore-Garfield high school, where it holds bi-monthly meetings, in addition to providing ACT Testing Support programs and FAFSA workshops to prepare students in applying for the Kenmore-Garfield Stark State College Scholarship.

For more information on Akron Promise and the SST, please see:

www.facebook.com/AkronPromise or www.AkronPromise.org.

Or please contact Dr. Jeanne-Hélène Roy, Executive Director at
nena@akronpromise.org (330) 715-5598

https://kenmorechamber.com/images/KC/2021/KEN_CON_87.pdf#page=12

Akron Promise’s Student Success Team Steers Kenmore-Garfield Students Towards Bright Outcomes
by Jeanne-Hélène Roy

“No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship.”
–Dr. James Comey, Child Psychiatrist and Education Specialist, Yale University

Dr. James Comey’s simple, declarative sentence – delivered during a 1995 lecture – speaks mountains of truth in K-12 education, where often a strong connection with an adult will inspire students of opportunity to succeed after high school and into adulthood. For Stephanie Martin, a Nursing and Patient Care instructor at Kenmore-Garfield High School, Comey’s words hit home over the course of a discussion with Tom Ghinder, Founder of Akron Promise, an educational non-profit launched in 2015. In 2017, Akron Promise established a direct working relationship with Kenmore-Garfield High School, and two years later the non-profit announced the Kenmore-Garfield Stark State Scholarship.

The Student Success Team
Since the implementation of its scholarship program, Akron Promise also inaugurated the Student Success Team (SST), a mentoring group available to assist the entirety of Kenmore-Garfield’s 786 students. Staffed by Mike DiFalco, the school’s Academic Achievement Coordinator, and Margaret Tulay, an Education major at the University of Akron, the crew welcomed Akron Promise’s new Executive Director Dr. Jeanne-Hélène (Néna) Roy last week; since the SST’s inception Ghinder served as the group’s third member.

On bi-monthly SST meeting days, learners arrive with their APSissued Chromebooks in tow, ready to participate in goal-setting activities while relishing sandwiches provided by the team. Skills taught range from time-management to ACT prep and résumé-writing. Seniors learn to complete FAFSA forms as well as to compose college application essays and apply for jobs. The SST continues to monitor seniors after graduation as they segue into the workforce and/or enroll in college programs.

Flexibility: Celebrating the Individual
Ghinder attributes the program’s success to its underlying flexibility. Rather than approach mentoring with a one-size-fits-all mindset, the SST practices a version of “radical hospitality,” which in this context entails meeting students where they are to address their own expressed needs.

By considering each student’s unique circumstances and goals, the SST not only provides directional assistance to learners, but also cultivates qualities that can’t be found in a manual: respect and empathy. When met with direct eye contact and supportive words, humans tend to respond in kind. Part of the SST’s philosophy, then, is to transcend mentoring models that adhere to a rigid structure, as well as to bring a “human touch” into the equation.

It Takes a Village
We all know that nobody can brave it alone in the world, and this aphorism certainly holds true in the case of the SST’s efforts. Without the help of invited guest speakers who periodically hold lunchtime Q&A sessions and parents/community members who assist in transporting students to field-trip destinations, the SST wouldn’t be able to extend as many options for enrichment as it does to learners. The relationships Kenmore-Garfield students form with engaged adults in their midst are ultimately bonds for life, bonds passed down from one generation to the next.

For more information on Akron Promise and the SST, see:
https://www.facebook.com/AkronPromise
https://twitter.com/AkronPromise
http://www.AkronPromise.Org
or contact:
Dr. Jeanne-Hélène Roy
nroy.66@gmail.com
330-715-5598