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Breakthrough Summer

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By Kristin Economo, Associate Director of Breakthrough.

This July, Breakthrough Santa Fe students, teachers and directors rounded out a wildly successful ninth summer program, housed at Santa Fe Preparatory School.

Breakthrough’s mission is to support talented under-served youth in Santa Fe in thriving on the path to college. Students across Santa Fe apply to the program in sixth grade and commit to participating in two rigorous and exciting academic summers, in addition to school-year programming and extensive college preparation in high school.

This summer, eighteen high-school and college-aged teaching interns came from schools across the country, from Yale to Texas Tech to Pomona, as well as schools here in Santa Fe, to dip their feet into the world of education and stand before their very own classrooms. They led Breakthrough’s sixty middle-school students in analyzing novels like Ender’s Game, understanding Singapore Math, and engaging in creative electives such as, Animal Bodies and Russian 101. Students completed two to three hours of homework each night and made significant gains in the skills which will prepare them for rigorous high-school and college coursework.

In addition, Breakthrough’s high school students returned to Santa Fe Prep’s campus for the second summer of the innovative College Bound Program. In College Bound, each high school grade returns for one or two weeks of community building, ACT prep, college campus visits, essay writing and more! With upwards of seventy Breakthrough students participating in College Bound each summer, this new component of the summer program has allowed Breakthrough to double its impact in the summer and allow older students to return for a booster-shot of intellectual stimulation, Breakthrough spirit, and to become excellent role models for younger students in the BTSF community.

Santa Fe Prep’s own Liz Friary led Breakthrough’s Writing Department as their mentor teacher and Molly Quay-de-la-Vallee (’10) taught pre-algebra to seventh and eighth grade students. All of us here at Breakthrough would like to extend a warm thanks to those two incredible women as well as all of the many individuals who lent a hand this summer and helped make the magic possible!