Davenport hopes college aid 'promise' is met in '08
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By Sheena Dooley | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 |
Next year’s graduates in Davenport could be the first to receive a free college education if community leaders have their way.
Officials from the city, school district and DavenportOne met last week to discuss finding a way to put potentially all Davenport students through college. Dubbed “The Davenport Promise,” the program is being looked at as a way to revitalize the local economy by attracting new families and businesses into the city. It also would create a more skilled workforce for employers, officials said.
The three groups have yet to flush out the details of such a plan, including how they will pay for it and who gets the scholarships. They will rely on a task force of community members to provide them with recommendation by as soon as this summer, said Craig Malin, Davenport city administrator.
Once the committee forms, they will use a preliminary proposal drafted by Malin to guide their efforts. Highlights from the plan include:
n Providing graduates with scholarships that they could use at four-year Iowa colleges and two-year vocational training programs, while providing a $10,000 “Homestead” grant to those who go into the military. Once they completed their service time, veterans would be able to put that money toward a mortgage when they returned home.
n Requiring students who plan to use the scholarship to complete 500 hours of community service.
n Making the first promise to the Class of 2008.
n Locating existing money to use in the city’s and school district’s current budget, asking taxpayers for new dollars or finding private donors to fund the program. In its first year, a promise would cost almost $4.2 million, according to early estimates based on last year’s graduating class.
n Determining how long students will have to attend Davenport schools in order to have all of their tuition covered and whether to offer it to those who have been in trouble with the law.
“(The proposal’s) principle purpose now is to sketch out an idea and provide it to individuals interested in the concept so they can determine whether or not they want to assist in making the idea fully formed,” Malin said.
City and school district leaders are modeling their efforts after a similar program in Kalamazoo, Mich. that started last school year. Under it, students receive a scholarship for public two- and four-year colleges in Michigan. The amount of tuition covered depends on how long they attended school in the district. To keep the scholarship, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA and show progress toward earning a degree.
Anonymous donors there agreed to cover the cost, which reached $2 million after the first year. That paid for 332 students’ first year of college. A majority of those students stayed in Kalamazoo to attend college, pumping more money into the local economy, said Michelle Miller-Adams, a visiting scholar at the UpJohn Institute for Employment Research who has been researching the impact of the Kalamazoo Promise.
The price in Davenport most likely would be higher, as it will graduate almost twice as many students this year.
About 180 students chose to not use the money because they either didn’t qualify, chose to go to an out-of-state school, received a scholarship to another college or didn’t continue their education, she said.
“We have 25 percent more applications this year than were received last year,” Miller-Adams said. “And the application process is not over yet. There is a big jump in the number of kids going to college… Every year it gets easier for seniors because they’ve had more time to prepare for it.”
In addition to seeing fewer kids drop out of high school and more planning to attend college, the Kalamazoo district also gained almost 1,000 new students and $7.4 million in new state money, which is doled out based on enrollment.
Davenport schools have experienced declines in enrollment in recent years, much like Kalamazoo saw prior to starting their scholarship program. This school year, Davenport lost 212 students and more than $1 million in state funding.
While the Kalamazoo school district saw the benefits, so did the city.
Miller-Adams said property values and home sales — both of which are on the decline across the state — went up as families from 88 communities in Michigan and 32 other states moved into Kalamazoo. That in turn increases the city’s tax base and will fuel economic development.
“The return is immediate,” said Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent. “If you are ever going to improve you have to push the envelope on what could potentially be. Here is a system that works. It works better than the lottery. And the data is there to support it.”
Sheena Dooley can be contacted at (563)383-2363 or sdooley@qctimes.com.
Take a look at the city's initial Davenport Promise proposal at http://www.qctimes.com/multimedia/documents/070516_davenport_promise.pdf
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