STUDENT SUPPORT

Giving's Ripple Effect

UVM alumna Anna Levin Nicholson's brother Jonathan loved teaching and was dedicated to the underprivileged students who made up the majority of the student population at William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx, New York. His students knew him not only as a gifted teacher who opened their minds to the world of poetry and literature, but also as a mentor and friend. As the son of Time Warner chairman and chief executive Gerald Levin, he could have chosen a privileged and high-profile lifestyle. But the chance to make a positive impact on the lives of inner-city youth made teaching his passion. Then tragedy struck. Jonathan was murdered in his Upper West Side apartment by a former student on May 30, 1997, only days after Anna graduated from UVM with a degree in social work.

At the time of Jonathan's death, Gerald Levin and Barbara Riley had been considering establishing a scholarship fund at UVM because of Anna's educational experience in the College of Education and Social Services. A year after the tragic loss of Jonathan, the family decided to honor his memory by establishing a scholarship fund that would make a UVM education possible for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Gerald and Barbara created the Jonathan Levin Scholarship Fund to support students from metropolitan New York, northern New Jersey, Boston, and Philadelphia who could not attend UVM without financial assistance.

"That gift was a catalyst for so many good things at UVM that advanced our commitment to enhancing the diversity of the student body," says Kathleen Kelleher, the University's principal gifts officer. "The Jonathan Levin Scholarship had a ripple effect in terms of our ability to form our partnership with Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, which then led to another very significant relationship with JetBlue Airways."

UVM's partnership with Christopher Columbus High School (CCHS) is designed to promote early college awareness, provide counseling to students and families about financial aid opportunities, offer individual counseling sessions to students, pair UVM faculty with high school faculty in their academic disciplines, and provide high school college counselors with realistic assessments of students' readiness to attend UVM.
The program's goal is to raise students' awareness of college opportunities generally, though it has also been proven to be an effective way to recruit capable UVM students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.

Since the first partnership was launched in 1999, the University has enrolled 131 African, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American (ALANA) students from partnership high schools, including 82 from Christopher Columbus, making CCHS the largest feeder school for ALANA students during the period and the largest out-of-state feeder school for first-time, full-time undergraduates overall. Between fall 1999 and fall 2006, UVM's undergraduate ALANA population increased by 86 percent to 612 students.

"Our partnership with UVM and the JetBlue connection has opened a door to a world that the students of Christopher Columbus High School would never have had access to," says CCHS principal Lisa Fuentes. "The Vermont experience has been life altering for these young adults and their families."

The Christopher Columbus partnership attracted considerable attention in higher education and the media, including a front page story in The New York Times, and earned the Outstanding High School-College Partnership Award from the New England Board of Higher Education. The program was cited by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in its 2003 report on "Race-Neutral Alternatives in Postsecondary Education: Innovative Approaches to Diversity." Fortunately for UVM, the program also caught the eye of alumnus Alex Wilcox '94, a former UVM Student Government Association president who then embarked on an exciting career as director of business development for New York's hometown airline, JetBlue Airways.

Wilcox was impressed by the University's creative approach to broadening diversity and saw an opportunity to help it along. Contributing in meaningful ways to the communities it serves has been a part of the JetBlue culture from its inception. With destinations in both Burlington, Vermont, and New York City, JetBlue would be able to contribute to both communities by supporting the Christopher Columbus partnerships, he reasoned. Wilcox took his idea to his colleagues and David Neeleman, then chairman and CEO of JetBlue, and the company responded with a commitment to provide free transportation for UVM faculty and admissions staff to travel to CCHS on a regular basis and to bring CCHS students to Burlington to visit the campus.

JetBlue's leadership was so impressed with the CCHS partnership and the caliber of the Burlington-Bronx connection that the company also made a commitment to contribute $50,000 annually in scholarship support for CCHS students choosing to attend UVM.

"JetBlue takes pride in being active in the communities we serve," says Icema Gibbs, JetBlue's director of community relations. "New York is our home, of course, and Burlington is one of our destinations, so we view the UVM/Christopher Columbus High School program as a wonderful way to show that we care about education and have an impact in both communities." She said JetBlue views its participation in the partnership as a model of good corporate citizenship and is excited about the program's success. "Ultimately," she says, "the impact is hope. It's important to us that these students understand they have the ability to do whatever they want, and there are people who are willing to help them along."

The ideals that led a young teacher to devote himself to the education of inner-city youth live on today at the University of Vermont through the Johathan Levin Scholarship Fund, which has awarded more than $600,000 in scholarship aid to students from urban high schools; the corporate philanthropy of JetBlue Airways, which continues to provide scholarship support and air transportation in support of the urban partnership with Christopher Columbus High School; and through the growing numbers of students from multicultural backgrounds who in choosing UVM have advanced its commitment to creating a diverse University community.