Increasing opportunities for academic success

Deborah Long has been an educator for 40 years, but it wasn’t until 2007, when she helped create the Elon Academy – a college-access and success program for students with limited financial resources and/or no family history of college – that her career came full-circle with her passion for working with underserved students and their families.

“I always say I have three children that I gave birth to, but I now have 140 children – 137 came my way through the Elon Academy. We are like a family in the Elon Academy,” Long says. “We build relationships and trust over a long period of time.”

Those relationships have yielded amazing results. The first students selected five years ago to take part in the program are today rising juniors at colleges and universities across the state. Many Academy graduates have received academic scholarships, including a member of the Alpha Class and a member of the Beta Class (“We name our cohorts by the Greek alphabet,” Long explains) who were awarded scholarships to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University, respectively, as well as Gates Millennium Scholarships funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Read the full article here: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/academics/presidents_report/2012/long.xhtml