Scd Enrichment Program

As we support middle and high school students in gifted education and advanced coursework, the support of our BIPOC college mentors is vital in the development of our students. Our college mentors provide their lived experiences as a college student and provide tutoring and academic support to our students. They support our students in hours of support during our school program and also provide community support while hosting Mentor Monthly sessions and weekly college readiness workshops. We use the observations of our Education Coordinators and our college mentors to begin the process to formally recommend the unidentified gifted students for gifted school services. Equipping our college mentors with the frame of perspective, language and trained observation skills are necessary in our program identifying more BIPOC gifted and talented students. Our BIPOC college Mentors allow SCDEP students to observe and learn from college students that share their identity, which creates positive images to replace any negative biases with positive truths. We also support our college students as they develop the necessary skills to become successful adults. We created the College Mentor Catalyst Program, that contains modules for our college mentors to participate in to build up their executive functioning skills in order to be successful adults, college students and mentors. Each module is based on an area that impacts the needs of the students. College mentors receive stipends per module and create a plan of action and budget for completing each topic in order to test out their new skills. These areas will impact our future college mentors and we will continue to evaluate a trend of needs as we build the College Mentor Catalyst program.

Our Gifted Summer Camp is a condensed version of our school-based program with added components of cultural performances from our community, and an advocacy workshop for parents to understand their students' newfound gifted identity superpowers and what to look for in successful advanced programs at local schools. Our summer camp is conducted independently during the day in the summer. We usually host our summer camp in person at a neighborhood school that matches the demographics of the students that we serve. When we conducted virtual summer camps, we were able to offer our summer camp to students nationally. Our summer camp is open to any BIPOC student in the community that already or wants to take advanced coursework and for gifted, high achieving, or not identified students. Through our curriculum, students are able to gather a body of evidence to support their enrollment in advanced coursework and the formal gifted identification process for their school district.