Rochester Prep Seniors Celebrate Their College Going Plans

Amid a worldwide pandemic and national protests sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd, seniors at Rochester Prep found a way to look to the future world that they will help build by celebrating their college-going plans.

A typical Senior Signing Day at Rochester Prep includes a raucous pep rally in an auditorium, but social distancing forced the students to turn to a virtual version that was aired on YouTube.

Students announced with pride the colleges they would be graduating from in four years and listened to words advice from Clayton Turner, the director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

“You’ve gained some tools, and those tools are adaptability, perseverance, and success,” the Rochester native said. “You put those things together to achieve something that you wouldn't have imagined sometime before. As we learn to work through this COVID environment, you learn to work through a different environment than you've done before.”

Rochester Prep is a high performing K-12 charter school in Rochester whose mission is to ensure students enter into, succeed in and graduate from college.

Along the way, Rochester Prep students gain experiences that help shape their future. For Sandro Bourdeau, he was able to participate in a program at Rochester Institute of Technology that focused on food deserts and nutritional impacts on his community.

He is off to Morehouse College, a historically black college, where he is planning to study business administration and economics. He earned a scholarship that will pay for almost all of his tuition.

But he will miss his teachers at Rochester Prep, especially those that he “was really cool with, that helped me grow, shape how I think, even the ones that helped me get into the place I’m at, to college, I’m really thankful to them,” he said.

Rochester Prep High School shut down its facility on March 13 due to the Coronavirus, but opened back up 4 days later remotely on March 17 to ensure students could continue their path to college.

“Our students literally couldn’t afford for us not to get back to learning,” said Paul Powell, Assistant Superintendent for Uncommon Schools, which Rochester Prep is part of. The College Board’s Advanced Placement exams were just around the corner, and AP exams often act as gatekeepers to certain colleges and scholarships.

So after hundreds of calls and deliveries of equipment and help with getting free online services, Rochester Prep High School students were ready to keep learning and keep driving towards college.