Nicholls receives $1.2 million grant to house opportunity center

Nicholls was awarded a five-year, $1.2 million, Federal Trio Grant to fund an educational center that will create higher education opportunities to low-income first generation students.

The Bayou Educational Opportunity Center will provide at least 1,000 students the resources needed to further their postsecondary education along the grant’s five years of extent.

The center will target high school seniors within Terrebonne, Lafourche and Assumption parishes as well as college students attending South Central Louisiana Technical College, Fletcher Technical Community College and Bayou Cane Adult Education School.

Since 66 percent of Nicholls students are first-generation, the program plans to also target the parents of these students. Nicholls’ Institutional Research Office will identify and contact these parents with hopes that they would want to further their education.

“The primary aim is to let these target populations know that colleges are accessible to them through grants and scholarships,” Nicholls Director of Research and Sponsored Programs Debi Benoit said. “The program will help students navigate what they might consider a barrier for them to enter college.”

The Continuing Education Program, Financial Aid Program and Career Services departments at Nicholls will develop workshops to inform the students and parents about the resources available to them.

The grant was awarded on August 31 and went into effect on September 1. The plans for the opportunity center are currently under the preliminary work phase, before it can become an active program.

“We are working on hiring personnel right now. After that, we’ll have to focus on creating brochures and flyers to advertise the program. It will probably take a good six to eight months for everything to fall into place,” Benoit said.

The grant will fund the salaries of the Opportunity Center’s Director, two outreach coordinators, student employees and the participants’ personal mentors.

However, the grant will not fund the participants’ tuition. The program will, instead, serve as a resource to assist students in receiving scholarships and Pell grants.

In order to recruit students for the program, the outreach coordinators will conduct meetings with high school counselors, who will identify students that fit the program’s criteria.

“The director and outreach coordinators will go to schools in the targeted parishes to address those groups of students,” Benoit said. “They will also ask the school counselors to put on little workshops about the provided resources in the hopes to steer them towards higher education.”

According to Benoit, this program isn’t a way to recruit people for Nicholls, but a way to recruit people to higher education. Each selected participants will be assigned to a personal mentor to improve his or her chances of success.

“These mentors will be faculty and staff from Nicholls, because they know the college system and how to access needed information,” Benoit said. “We want them to be a personal resource for the student, so they may email them to keep in touch.”

Earlier this year, the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs wrote proposals for two Trio Grant Programs, the Talent Search and the Educational Opportunity Center, as a request of Nicholls provost and vice president of academic affairs, Lynn Gillette.

Although Nicholls was denied the Talent Search grant, the Trio Grant Program chose Nicholls among several schools across the nation to receive the Educational Opportunity Center grant awarded this fall.

“[The decision] is based on points,” Benoit said. “They issue a score on whether or not they think you matched the criteria they were looking for. Our score was quite high, so we were able to get to the top of the list that way.”

The Federal Trio Grant Program includes eight programs that were created to assist high-need, low-income, first-generation college students in succeeding academically.

“A college education can change the trajectory of a person’s life,” Gillette said. “We are excited that we received this grant from the Department of Education to help more first-generation, low-income students in our region obtain a college degree.”

The U.S. Department of Education awarded $48 million in Trio Educational Opportunity Centers Grants to 143 colleges in 42 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia this year.