Wingspan is a program designed to combat common financial barriers students face as single parents. Funding for the program was provided by the Musgrave Foundation, who first approached Ozarks Tech with the idea to build a program to aid single parents going to school.
Ozarks Tech recently received $100,000 from the Musgrave Foundation – the third and final installment of their three-year grant for the Wingspan Initiative.
A team of community resource specialists (CRS) at Ozarks Tech work to identify deserving students for the Wingspan Initiative, according to Sarah Bargo, the college director of student care and engagement who administers the Wingspan program. She said the CRS know the students well and are able to identify and recommend which students are showing promise but struggling due to outside challenges.
Bargo said the initiative is unique to Ozarks Tech, an institution where about a quarter of the student population is parents.
“They’re juggling a lot of responsibilities, and there's a lot of things competing for their attention, including childcare costs, food costs,” said Bargo. “Those are things that can really get in the way of someone’s ability to be successful here if they can’t provide for themselves.”
Without any support, most of these students are at risk of taking a semester off or not maintaining high grades. Bargo said the idea is to eliminate barriers outside of the classroom so that they can be successful inside the classroom.
“We’ve been able even to purchase a used car for a student that didn’t have a car to get back and forth to their classes and clinicals,” she said. “We’ve been able to secure rental homes for students that were struggling to find stable housing. We’ve certainly put a lot of food on the table for students that are struggling to feed their children and themselves.”
She explained that a lot of their single-parent students are living day to day, so eliminating stress and being able to offer more financial stability has been life-changing for them.
There are currently about 10 students using the program, Bargo said. There’s $5,000 per semester awarded to each student, which can also be renewed per semester as long as they are enrolled in the following semester and they’ve made good academic progress.
Bargo added that there’s just a small piece required by the student – to let Wingspan staff know how their semester went and how the funds helped them.
“And so then we take that information and share it back with Musgrave and others to let them know that the work that we’ve put into this program is all panning out because our students, I mean every single one of them, incredibly grateful,” she said. “Again, for most of them, their words, not mine – life-changing.”
Bargo said the ultimate goal for any program at Ozarks Tech is to get these students to graduation.
“We want to make sure that our students get to the finish line because we know when they get to the finish line, chances are they’re able to pull themselves and probably their family, perhaps out of poverty,” she said.
She added they don’t look at students as just a GPA or a number in a classroom, but they view them in a holistic way to better recognize and address the issues that students are facing outside of the classroom.
