Dr. Hunter Huckabay works with GEAR UP students at The Howard School in Chattanooga. Photo by Angela Foster.
Diamond Jones was living in her car as a student at Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy when the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga reached out to her through its GEAR UP program. It turned her life around.
GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) this spring is celebrating 25 years of connecting students primarily from urban schools to college.
Jones wound up as her high school’s salutatorian and graduated from the University of Memphis in 2021 with a bachelor of arts degree in professional studies with an emphasis on human services and a minor in nonprofit management. She currently teaches kindergarten at Germanshire Elementary in Memphis and is enrolled in an online graduate program.
As a teenager, her mother died and her father was incarcerated.
“I chose GEAR UP and they helped me get into foster care. I became a GEAR UP counselor after I graduated high school, and my [then] sixth graders are going to graduate this year,” Jones said.
UTC’S GEAR UP primarily works with Brainerd and Howard high schools and Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy but also intervenes with middle school students at the city’s urban schools, such as Dalewood, East Lake Academy and Orchard Knob, said Dr. Hunter Huckabay, UTC program director for GEAR UP. The goal is to create first-generation college students out of GEAR UP participants.
There is no formal anniversary celebration in the works, but GEAR UP at UTC will spend this year and part of next writing an application for a new project that would begin in 2025. Each project lasts six to seven years and is funded by the federal government for about $750,000 a year. The next project is seeking $5.2 million in federal funding.
Dr. Hunter Huckabay
“What we do from an overall standpoint is work with kids who likely would not otherwise be on track to go to college to get them prepared for college,” Huckabay said.
GEAR UP helps underprivileged children through academic interventions, mentoring, and assistance in developing social and emotional skills that “can just allow them to stay in the game,” he said.
According to GEAR UP’s upcoming project narrative, the program would again serve students at an “acute disadvantage compared to their peers” who, without GEAR UP, would “face grim educational prospects.”
Compared to Hamilton County peers, a ninth grader from Howard or Brainerd is 64% less likely to enroll in college and 158% less likely to earn a college degree.
“Hamilton County, with its urban center in Chattanooga, includes deeply impoverished minority communities served by the target schools: the Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy (CGLA), Brainerd, and Howard high schools, and their feeder middle schools: Dalewood, East Lake Academy, Orchard Knob, and CGLA Middle. Residents in these blighted zones face obstacles others do not in the effort to succeed academically and enter college,” the project narrative states.
About 99% of the targeted students live in low-income households at or below 150% of federal poverty guidelines, and two-thirds are in single-parent homes.
The latter describes Mekal Smith, who graduated from Howard High in 2013 and earned degrees from Tuskegee Institute and UT Knoxville. He is a technical analyst for Terminix and handles the renewals of 2,500 of the company’s business licenses nationwide. He also owns his own rental car company, Black Edge Car Rentals, and is a “one-man army” with a fleet of 20 vehicles.
“I owe going to college to GEAR UP,” Smith said. “The program built a level of obligation and dedication and taught me discipline,” starting with a summer boot camp hosted by military personnel and 5 a.m. daily wakeup calls. “GEAR UP has always pushed me to be more.”
GEAR UP also helps garner financial aid and scholarships. Smith, for example, got a full ride to Tuskegee running track.
UTC hires its own students to work with GEAR UP participants through its marquee after-school and in-school tutoring programs. There also is a summer residential camp and a summer math head start camp.
“We’re creating for these students ongoing lasting, dynamic relationships with people who they likely would never meet, which are current college students,” Huckabay said. “The GEAR UP students are going to identify with the UTC students who come and work with them. And so they’re meeting college students who are interested in them, believe in them, cheering them on.
“That really helps them feel like, ‘OK, yes, if I were in college, I would have a place because here’s my person and they validate me.’ We’re getting them early enough to where you really can intervene and help.”
UTC’s GEAR UP program aims to reduce the dropout rate of its target students by 10% and increase its graduation rate from 70% to 85%. The 2018-25 GEAR UP plan concluding next year at UTC aims to increase college enrollment at CGLA, Howard and Brainerd from 39% to 64%.
The entire 10th and 11th grade classes at all target schools are given access to GEAR UP, the project states.
“We also are focusing on the parents,” said Huckabay, who graduated from UTC in 1981 with a bachelor of arts degree in English. His master’s and Ph.D. degrees came from LSU in 1985 and the University of Washington in 1990. “You have to have buy-in from the parents.”
Because many of the parents of targeted students work second- and third-shift jobs and are difficult to reach, UTC uses a two-way texting platform to deliver bite-sized chunks of information to parents.
Huckabay taught at Northwestern University and then Chattanooga’s Baylor School before joining UTC’s GEAR UP program in 2000. He grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana.
“So we do a lot of professional development,” he said. “We’re about to send a group of, I think it’s six teachers, math teachers at Howard, Brainerd and Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, to a Texas Instruments Conference where the training will be outstanding. And then they’ll also come back with really great ideas about products that will work with their students.”
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GEAR UP photo gallery by Angela Foster
