5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Kids Prepare For College
Christine Sylvain Of The Path to College Fellowship On The 5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School
Really create positive affirmations for when they do well in school. I like to give my kids money if they get good grades. I’m not above that. I want them to totally connect the fact that doing well in school means you’ll do better in life, that there’s a return.
School is really not easy these days. Many students have been out of school for a long time because of the pandemic, and the continued disruptions and anxieties are still breaking the flow of normal learning. What can parents do to help their children thrive and excel in school, particularly during these challenging and anxiety-provoking times?
To address this, we started a new series called ‘5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School.” In this interview series, we are talking to teachers, principals, education experts, and successful parents to learn from their insights and experience.
As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure to interview Christine Sylvain.
Christine Sylvain is the Founder and Executive Director of the Path to College Fellowship, whose mission is to secure the acceptance of as many high-achieving, low-income students into top-tier universities as possible. Christine’s vision is to answer and address one of society’s most urgent educational inequities: access to higher education. She has a Master of Arts in Journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in Political Science from the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us a bit about your “backstory”?
Iam the daughter of a Haitian-American immigrant father and an Irish-American mother. I was born in New York and grew up all over Florida.
I always say the path to success is not linear. I was the typical kind of smart kid in my household and I was pegged as the type who should be a lawyer very young. I was always education and school-focused up until high school when my brother has some issues, my dad lost his job and went through a period of unemployment, and our family just really struggled during that time. My parents moved a lot to try to find better work situations for my dad and it really disheveled me as a student and as an adolescent. It didn’t give me a good adolescence to thrive, so launching into college, I didn’t really even want to go. I felt burned out and wanted to take a year off, but it was my brother who came to me and said, “No, you‘ve got to go to college. You’re the smart one of the family. I dropped out. You gotta go.”
So, I applied to just one school and it was a great college that I would say saved me. I earned my Bachelor of Arts cum laude in Political Science from the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. I got into a ton of very prestigious law schools and decided not to go after doing an internship where saw the career more up-close. After making my dad cry, I did take that year off finally and moved to New York, where I got my Master of Arts in Journalism from New York University. This was during the financial crisis, so the messaging was very doom and gloom about print media.
I ended up segueing over into documentary work and worked as an associate producer in Miami for documentaries for PBS and HBO, as well as doing a lot of narrative type videos for companies there. I had a baby and was not happy with the balance of career and motherhood, so I decided for a short period of time that I would teach, so that I could be home more and I fell into teaching. I put my resume out there, I got hired the next day after a 25 minute interview, and started two weeks later. That’s when I really got exposed to so much disparity in the education system. I was in Riviera Beach, Fla. and I was exposed to a lot of students with Haitian backgrounds who were just as smart as I was and whose families had gone through a lot more than my family had and who needed that extra support and doors opened to opportunity, but it wasn’t then that I was ready to do that.
I had a second child and worked for a private school where I got really good at teaching the SAT and ACT as well as doing college advising on top of teaching English and tutoring and U.S. history. That was great for when my son was young, but I felt like I had more to give to the community and that there was this group of students who really, really needed the help and I just thought, I can do something for these kids and I’m going to. I got really obsessed with wanting to make a difference and wanting to start a non-profit. I worked on it for about 10 months after work and deep into the night hours for no pay. I was able to secure some funding and get a very small stipend and go down to super part time at my job. Within another six months, I was able to take it on full time. It’s been a lot of work and growth since then and getting the community behind me to run an organization that has a half million-dollar budget and has helped thousands of kids.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Early on in my career, one of my mentors said, “Once you’re successful, people will start to come for you.” I really didn’t think that would apply to me, but within a year, I had people who I consider on the same team as me, doing the same work, trying to work for educational equity, basically teaming up to try to make me look bad, to try to mess with us. I was so attacked by people who should be co-conspirators and collaborators, and were a bit threatened by my work and my determination. They did all they could to try to knock me off and they were not successful. I think what I learned was that I have a very strong sense of character. I never retaliated at them. I never talked badly about them in the community. I just remained focused on the work and kept doing really great work that was hard to ignore and those people no longer became an issue.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There are definitely quotes that drive my work and really clarify why I do what I do. One of them is from Stephen Jay Gould and his quote is, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
That one really drives home why I feel like we absolutely need to provide opportunity for every kid out there, no matter what, because I think it is better for society as a whole long-term to get the best and brightest functioning at the highest level.
Another one that I really love is a Toni Morrison quote: “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’”
One of Path to College’s core values is to try to create a bigger ripple effect through our students taking on leadership positions. We want our students to echo the expert advice that we give them and bring it to their friend groups and into their communities to try to create a bigger impact.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1) Determination
2) Boldness
3) Empathy
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Our 5th Annual Education Fest will be held June 9th at 5:30 p.m. at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach. At the event, we will hold a student persuasive speech contest, award the Education Champion Of the Year, and host a panel on the future of artificial intelligence in education. It’s going to be a very entertaining and really thought-provoking event.
The next exciting project that we are working on is in partnership with NextEra, the parent company of Florida Power & Light (FPL), and the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE). We are going to be hosting a 50-student youth energy academy where the students will spend a day at their nuclear energy plant up in St. Lucie County and learn all about the careers of the future.
For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit why you are an authority about how to help children succeed in school?
I am the Founder and Executive Director of Path to College. We fearlessly clear the path for overlooked students to get into the best colleges. We do that through rigorous expert college admission guidance to secure full-ride scholarships and expand the students’ network to launch their futures with unparalleled career opportunities. I am an authority on this subject matter because of my experiences as a teacher, as a non-profit executive, and as someone who has helped hundreds upon hundreds of students personally increase their competitiveness in college admissions, as well as navigate through the education system.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. Can you help articulate the main challenges that students face today that make it difficult to succeed in school?
There’s a lack of knowledge when it comes to the right path for each student. There are so many paths. It’s like menu overload. There are so many choice programs and schools. Each school does it a little bit differently.
There might be better teachers at one school for one subject than the other and it’s kind of like a lottery that your kid will get that right teacher in the right subject that will really light the flame of curiosity and passion for them. I think one of the main challenges is also that teachers are so overloaded with all the tasks that go along with teaching like admin tasks, behavioral issues, conferences, and professional development, that they often have very little time to do lesson planning, which is probably the most important thing that they do. You want lessons to be really innovative, really hands-on, really exciting for kids and I think it’s really tough to do and do it well, especially for new teachers. So often kids zone out or they are not pulled into it because they are not having fun. There’s a Leonardo da Vinci quote that says, “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” Basically, in order to remember something, you have to have a really fun, positive emotion attached to it. I think that’s one of the difficulties from the teaching side.
Can you suggest a few reforms that you think schools should make to help students to thrive and excel?
Project-based learning seems to be the best. Teachers who have cultural competency where they can see the students for who they are no matter what their background is and connect with them is super important. The other reform that I would suggest that is a little bit more out-of-the-box is to batch students based on learning style and aptitude rather than just age. Age is just a really random way to group students and all students develop differently. That would be a reform that would change everything, but it could really give students what they need from us.
Here is our primary question. Can you please share your “5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Children Thrive and Excel In School?” Please share a story or example for each.
1) Really create positive affirmations for when they do well in school. I like to give my kids money if they get good grades. I’m not above that. I want them to totally connect the fact that doing well in school means you’ll do better in life, that there’s a return.
2) Create structure in the home, so that the students have homework time and that homework is prioritized amongst the family as a whole.
3) Spend time with your kids, learning together, asking questions, and just maintaining a spirit of curiosity in the home and positivity.
4) When the student may be struggling, I would just really try to get ahead of it and not wait. If you’re connected, if you’re aware of what’s going on, you won’t be surprised that a student might be falling behind in a certain subject. You should hopefully get them the help that they need ahead of time before it becomes an issue on their report card.
5) Utilize free resources. Libraries have free tutoring. You can pay for a tutor, but I think there is a lot going on in parents’ lives and shepherding their education is a lot on top of work and everything else, but it’s very important.
As you know, teachers play such a huge role in shaping young lives. What would you suggest needs to be done to attract top talent to the education field?
I think we need to reward teachers who stay in the field with a very competitive bonus structure and with different incentives for travel and for learning. Teachers are lifelong learners themselves, at least good teachers are. If we can have special programs for them to do externships, to do study abroad programs, and to continue their own personal learning so that they can bring it back to the classroom, I think you’ll get really engaged, excited teachers. I also think another thing teachers need is self-care and opportunities to de-stress.
It’s really hard to attract top talent to the education field because the salaries are so low and I say we need a bonus structure for teachers who stay in it a long time and I believe that, but I know the funding is very, very tight. I think school districts need to be very careful not to be top heavy and make sure that funding goes to teachers’ salaries as much as they can and I know that they try to. There’s some interesting stuff that’s happening to attract teachers to the field, but it’s just that top talent is going for the most exciting, highest paying jobs out there, so you have to get them young before they’re in a field where they realize how much they can really make in the world. They will fall in love with teaching because there is something very special about it.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
I would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with Michelle Obama. She’s someone who is very aligned with me as far as her values around education equity. I think if she knew about the work that we do, she would absolutely love it and want to elevate it and could give me some advice as well and connections that could be very successful for the organization to be able to help more kids.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.facebook.com/PathToCollegeOrg/
http://instagram.com/pathtocollege
https://twitter.com/pathtocollege_
https://www.linkedin.com/company/pathtocollege/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-sylvain/
Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!
