West Virginia’s U.S. senators declared victory Thursday in their push to restore funding to West Virginia State University’s Upward Bound program, which helps Kanawha County and Logan County students from low-income families or without bachelor’s degree-holding parents attend and graduate college.
Krystal Tolliver, the director of the school’s TRIO programs who will be the new Upward Bound director there, said the program enrolls qualifying students in eighth, ninth or 10th grades who attend Kanawha’s Capital, Nitro, Riverside, St. Albans, Sissonville and South Charleston high schools or Logan County High.
She said the school will be funded to serve 110 students per year, and it will help those students annually until they get to college through afterschool tutoring, 6-week summer learning sessions and developmental or college-level classes at WVSU’s campus two Saturdays a month.
Tolliver said the program continues to support the students in college and afterward if they need help with things like resume building and applying to graduate school.
She said WVSU hopes to restart serving students in October.
On WVSU’s application for Upward Bound funding for last academic year, officials made a small clerical mistake of $104 on a supporting document to go with its application, and the school lost out on half a million dollars for last academic year alone.
WVSU officials said Thursday that the U.S. Education Department, which administers the grants and which received criticism from West Virginia’s congressional delegation over the denied funds, allowed the school to apply to start getting funds again this academic year, instead of having to wait four more academic years before the current five-year cycle ended.
Jack Bailey, WVSU’s assistant vice president for university communications and marketing, said the university will now receive $522,363 in each of the next five years.
“When we lost funding last year, the university was told we wouldn’t be able to reapply until the next funding cycle,” Bailey said.
“It’s definitely a good day,” Tolliver said. “We’re just ecstatic that the senators did step in and, because of their hard work, our program has been restored.”
“We lost a little piece of our history and now we’re regaining it so we intend to move forward,” said Scott Woodard, WVSU’s associate provost and associate vice president for academic affairs.
“Not only do these programs help hardworking young men and women receive a high-quality education, but they also give them a chance to build a lifetime of success and achievement,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., in a news release. “That’s why I worked so hard to ensure students at West Virginia State University and other schools would not be left out of these important programs.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said in the joint release that “we have a lot of first time college students, many of whom come from low-income families that simply do not have the resources or experience to help their children navigate things like college applications, financial aid, and finally college itself. The Upward Bound program at West Virginia State University helps fill those voids and inspire students to achieve more than they ever thought was possible, like they have done over the last 50 years.”
Tolliver said the federal education department has also allowed WVSU to maintain the points it gets for factors like students staying in college after going through the program and graduating college. She said those points will help the university keep the grant in the future.
She said a separate Upward Bound grant with a focus on math and science, providing $250,000 annually, ran out in October of last year, but that was not connected to a clerical error and the university is trying to get that funding restored.