By Taylor James, Cornerstone Editor
TRIO has come to East Central College (ECC) to provide underserved students the opportunity for extra academic support.
TRIO Director Jake Little talked about the program coming to the college.
“TRIO is a federally funded program grant that allows East Central College to extend extra support to students that meet certain categories in order to help them achieve certain goals that we identify within that (TRIO) grant,” said Little.
The grant is called TRIO Student Support Service (TRIO SSS).
There are three target populations that the grant serves: first generation students, students with low income and students with disabilities.
“Students have to meet one of those (three) categories,” said Little. “Preferably more than one in order to be eligible to join the TRIO population.”
When students join TRIO they are going to get extra support.
“A lot of the support that they are getting is going to be similar to what they’re getting already at ECC,” said Little. “You get academic advising, you get career advising, you get tutoring, all that stuff is available to students.”
The difference with TRIO is that there are going to be more touchpoints with student success.
“The idea being, oftentimes these are students that don’t know how to navigate a complex bureaucratic system,” said Little. “So we’re trying to help them navigate that and be successful.”
TRIO has arranged for transfer visits and the TRIO staff will go with the students on those transfer visits.
They have a transfer visit set up with Southeast Missouri State University in April and they’re looking at visiting Lindenwood in the near future.
“While we’re down there, we’re gonna take a tour of the campus, we’re gonna take in a sports game,” said Little.
The focus of the grant is to get students to transfer, a certain percentage of the students must transfer to a four-year college, defined as a bachelor’s granting institution.
“Our goal is to serve our students and their interests,” said Little. “If they have career focus interests, then we’re absolutely going to serve that as well.”
Jefferson College, St. Louis Community College and Mineral Area College have TRIO at their institutions.
“These are great partner institutions and these are great folks for us,” said Little. ”Me and Michelle (Redmond) were just at Lindenwood yesterday (Feb. 26) and interacting with a couple of advisors up there and just talking through some of what their TRIO programs do and trading ideas.”
There are multiple types of TRIO grants, but this is the first one at ECC.
TRIO will be under the student development umbrella which is under the Vice President of Student Development Sarah Leassner.
Little will directly report to Leassner as the director of the TRIO grant.
He will have a full time and part time academic advisor as well as a part time admin assistant that will be working on the grant.
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