Aim High-St Louis

Aim High empowers motivated middle school students from high-risk environments to strengthen their character, self-confidence, determination, and initiative through a challenging, engaging academic and personal enrichment program. The program helps middle school students succeed in the classroom, develop a love of learning and aid in high school, college and career readiness. Aim High inspires the desire to learn, to stay in school, and to become respected leaders of the community.

Since 1991, Aim High has been helping middle school students succeed in the classroom, develop a love of learning and support a successful transition to high school, leading towards post-secondary education. The foundation of Aim High is a 4-year tuition-free five-week summer program that runs Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 2:45 pm. Students receive 3 hours of daily academic instruction in math, science, English, and social studies. Curriculum frameworks align with the Missouri’s state standards. Classes are limited to 15 students with high school and college-aged teaching assistants supporting professional educators in the classroom, yielding a teacher to student ratio of 1:4 or better, providing students the opportunity for individualized attention. Students enroll as rising 6th graders and complete the program just prior to their freshman year in high school, providing 4 years of support during the critical middle school years.

Students also participate in physical fun, elective and an advisory period daily. Physical fun provides a chance to engage in physical activity, promoting a healthy lifestyle, an opportunity to release energy and social bonding with peers and staff. Electives allow students the opportunity to choose an area of creative interest to explore through a hands-on approach. Options for electives range from robotics and coding to drama, dance and ceramics. Field trips and other special programming provide extended learning, exposure and growth opportunities. Advisory periods support social and emotional development using Circle Forward: Building a Restorative School Community and Golden Compass and Moral Dilemmas as the foundation of the curriculum. Students learn about self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship building skills and responsible decision-making. Research has shown a positive correlation between social and emotional learning, better school performance and long-term improvements in general well being.

Aim High also provides monthly Saturday sessions throughout the academic year to provide ongoing support for students. Saturday sessions consist of academic support and tutoring, cultural exploration in the city and early college and career exploration visiting and learning from organizations and businesses. Each campus attends Saturday programming once per month, a minimum of 8 sessions offered per student during the school year.

Aim High has knowledgable and experienced staff to help achieve the organization goals. The executive director has over 20 years experience in implementing, managing and developing youth programs with emphasis on college readiness and support services for a broad range of constituencies. The program director is a graduate of the Aim High program and provides expertise related to recruitment, program planning, curriculum development, and data collection and evaluation. Aim High also employs part-time staff to oversee site operations at each site and hires professional educators each summer to provide instruction in the classroom.

Aim High has long standing partnerships with four school districts that serve as primary recruitment districts in the St. Louis area. There are 81 elementary schools within the 4 partnering school districts and Aim High will host recruitment events at 50 of the 81. These partnership ensure students needing Aim High have access to the program's application process. In addition to the partnerships with the primary recruitment districts, Aim High has long standing partnership with host sites, two independent schools in St. Louis county. These partner campuses donate access to their space to host the summer program as well as Saturday sessions. Additionally, they allow Aim High to recruit their students to serve as volunteer Teaching Assistants.

Aim High is also able to meet goals because of the dedicated volunteers. Each year, Aim High recruits approximately 100 volunteers to serve as teaching assistants. Teaching assistants serve as near-peer mentors to the students and help in the classroom to provide one-on-one attention to students and maintain a 1:4 teacher to student ratio. These volunteers are often program graduates, students at the host institutions, or high school students from other local high schools.

Aim High has increased enrollment by 80% from 258 students in 2014 to 467 students in 2018. Aim High continues to exceed all targeted short-term objectives with 82% of students in 2019 demonstrating knowledge gains in 2 or more core subjects, 92% indicating high school graduation as an educational goal and 91% indicating college graduation as an educational goal. Data obtained from the National Clearinghouse indicate long-term success of Aim High graduates, with 77% of students who attended Aim High for 3-4 years going on to post-secondary education compared to just 44% of students that were accepted to Aim High, but never attended.

In 2020, Aim High is working with partnering school districts to collect additional data points that provide interim indicators that lead to an outcome of high school graduation for program attendees such as course selection, attendance, disciplinary records, and standardized test scores. Aim High has established a memorandum of understanding with two of the four partner recruitment districts that will allow this data sharing to occur to better track the outcomes of program participants. Additional data points will be collected on social and emotional learning through the investment of the REACH assessment and provide both short-term gains (pre and post summer) as well as long-term gains (pre 6th grade and post 9th grade).

Aim High is also in a capacity building mode and over the next 3-5 years will work to secure financing to support expansion. It is estimated that adding another site requires an additional $150,000 in funding annually to support the site operations. While building up funding to support expansion, Aim High remains committed to providing a high standard of curriculum and will continually evaluate the program curriculum and make adjustments as needed to enhance the program's effectiveness based on best practices, research, and program data.