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The Impact of Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection

WXXI News profiles Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection and its impact on students in the Rochester City School District.

Click on the video box below to watch the story that first aired on WXXI's Need to Know Rochester program on Friday, March 9, 2012.

Tyriek Porcha-Blackwell sees college in his future – a future that was in jeopardy not that long ago.

“I fell victim to the streets. I was hanging with the wrong crowd and couple of things happened to those guys that I didn’t want to happen to me,” the School Without Walls senior says.

With help from his principal and mentors from Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection, Porcha-Blackwell changed direction, “I did a different thing, which was get back to school, because it wasn’t too late.”

Now he has choices beyond the streets, “I’ve been accepted to Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, Finger Lakes Community College in Canandaigua, and Erie Community College in Buffalo,” he says.

Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection is a long running program designed to help at risk students graduate by giving them extra academic support, and job, usually at Wegmans. The program was started by Robert and Danny Wegman 25 years ago.

The initiative has drawn national attention and has been singled out by Governor Andrew Cuomo. Its biggest financial supporter is the Wegman Family Charitable Foundation, which contributes a little less than half the program’s $8 million budget in Rochester.

Despite all of the cheering, another portion of the program’s budget is shrinking according to Hillside Work-Scholarship President Patty Malgieri, “In the past year we sustained over a million dollar hit from cuts in the NY state budget. At one time from the Rochester City School district we were receiving a million-two, so that's been a cut over time. As a result we were close to 3,000 students in the Rochester City School district in this program, now we are down more like 2,500.”

“We hear from our teachers and principals, our partners in the schools, there are more kids who could desperately use a youth advocate so at the time we’re having to look at whether we can go, instead we’re having to cut back and we know the number of students who could benefit from the program is growing,” says Malgieri.

Malgieri says public support is becoming more important than ever in this economic environment, “I think traditionally Rochester had that philanthropic support from Wegmans and people from the philanthropic community knew about it and wanted to support it. So I think as a percentage it ended up that we didn't need as much public dollars, but increasingly we want to have that as our base. We want to have a sustainability plan that makes sure that we get at least 50% from public dollars.”

Malgieri says Hillside Work-Scholarship is a good investment. The Rochester City School District spends about $18,000 per pupil. By spending about $3,000 extra per student enrolled in its program Hillside is getting better graduation results.

According to 2010 graduation rates, 51% of  city school students graduated on time. That’s compared to 64% of district students enrolled in Hillside who graduated in four years.

Mary Doyle, chief of staff of the Rochester City School District, says she thinks Hillside is one of programs that adds value, “We do program evaluations for all of our programs - any organization we contract with we do a review of every year to assess how they're adding value to the district.”

She says the decision to cut the district’s contribution to Hillside from $1.2 million in 2009 down to $800,000 in 2011 was purely due to budgetary constraints, “We had hoped to have it higher but we had to cut several things last year unfortunately due to budget cuts so it’s a tight fiscal time but we remain committed to the program.”

Funding from the city has been dropping too – from $400,000 in 2010 down to $100,000 this year. Some city officials say it’s a money matter too.

But others in the community say there’s more to it that that. There are some who question whether to program is truly effective and they’re calling for ore accountability.