It’s not how most Black History Month workshops begin. 

“I’m streaming live from a hotel bathroom,” said Atnre Alleyne, co-founder and CEO of TeenSHARP, a college access program. 

Alleyne was speaking in February via Zoom to dozens of high school students in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. But his hotel bathroom was in western Ukraine, where, after awakening late that month to the sound of Russian bombs exploding, he and his family fled from their home in a Kyiv suburb. 

With Alleyne’s wife and co-founder, Tatiana Poladko, her 81-year-old father, and their three young children on the other side of the bathroom door, Alleyne loaded a virtual background — a 1968 of high school students on their way to a memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — and kicked off the workshop. 

“Injustice anywhere, as Dr. King said, is a threat to justice everywhere,” Alleyne told the students as he drew parallels between the fight against racial tyranny in the United States and political tyranny in Ukraine. “It is really important to be globally aware, globally conscious, and also to think of ways that you can stand up for what’s right.”

The couple’s commitment to their work and their students has been tested in recent years, first through the pandemic, when they transitioned to a virtual program, and then in January 2021, when they moved from Delaware to Poladko’s native Ukraine. The war and the family’s displacement further complicated matters.

But Alleyne, 37, and Poladko, 38, are steadfast. TeenSHARP, they say, is more than just a college access program serving low-income, Black, and Latino students; it is a leadership program. Their goals are more than just getting students accepted to, enrolled in and graduated from college; they are trying to close the gap that, on average, has left Black households with of the wealth of white households.

“I was an excellent student, a 4.0 student, but my parents never sugarcoated it. In this country, with the level of corruption that existed, that didn’t mean a whole lot,” Poladko said of Ukraine. “What I always tell students is that … someone sold you a lie in America that this is not also the case for you as a student of color. Your chances of success are as fleeting as mine were, and they are as dependent on luck as mine were. So what I always tell them is that at TeenSHARP, we are trying to diminish the percent of luck, and we do so by following the blueprint that affluent families have been following for years.”

Replicating that blueprint with fewer resources was already an uphill battle, requiring intensive work from families and the TeenSHARP staff, particularly Poladko, who serves as the college counselor. Living seven time zones and more than 4,000 miles away heightened the degree of difficulty. 

Earlier this year, before Russia invaded Ukraine, Poladko would start one-on-one meetings with early-rising high school seniors at 5:30 a.m. ET, or 12:30 p.m. in Ukraine. After four hours of consulting on waitlists and competing financial aid packages, including calls that Poladko often took while waiting outside her children’s ballet class or piano lesson, she would continue from 2:30 p.m. ET (9:30 p.m. in Ukraine) to around 8 p.m. ET (3 a.m. in Ukraine). 

“They realize that we’re going to go fricking hard for you, and you’re going to go fricking hard for yourself,” she said. “We have to show you how privileged America works — and you don’t know it.”

A flight to safety

The couple’s dedication is such that Russian bombs caused only a momentary pause in TeenSHARP’s programming. After the explosions woke the family on Feb. 24, Alleyne and Poladko, who don’t own a car, began searching for ways out. On Feb. 25, they celebrated their daughter’s Zoryana’s 7th birthday. The next day, they crammed eight people into an acquaintance’s Volkswagen Passat. The family only brought sandwiches and their clothes. After a 2.5-hour drive west, they reached the city of Zhytomyr, where Alleyne hosted the Black History Month workshop. 

“I couldn’t go to sleep [afterward], I was restless,” said Asquith Clarke II, a TeenSHARP alum who logged onto the workshop from Oberlin College in Ohio. “At first I thought to myself, ‘This is crazy, I’m not sure what I can do to support them, I have college things going on.’ But knowing how much Ms. Tatiana and Mr. Atnre have done for me, am I just going to sit here and go to sleep knowing that they’re in danger?” 

For the first time, Clarke wrote to his elected representatives, encouraging them to help Ukraine defend itself. The rising junior posted their replies to Instagram and encouraged his followers to act, too. 

Meanwhile, Alleyne, Poladko, their kids — 7-year-old Zoryana, 4-year-old Nazar and 2-year-old Taras — and her elderly father took a train, another train and a car driven by volunteers to get closer to the Polish border. They reached it after a 5-mile walk, Poladko ushering the children and Alleyne assisting her dad, already weakened from a long case of COVID. 

A series of temporary accommodations, some requiring the family to sleep side-by-side, heads next to toes, led them to Warsaw. 

By March, Alleyne and Poladko were able to enroll their children in day care and elementary school and rent a two-bedroom apartment in Warsaw that overlooks a tree-filled public park. Poladko’s father sleeps in one bedroom, and the couple and their children share three mattresses in the other. The family’s furniture is still in their rental house outside Kyiv, so decorations are limited to artwork the kids bring home from school. “You Are My Sunshine,” says a handmade painting in the living room.

To work, Alleyne perches his laptop on a bookshelf next to a Paw Patrol puzzle and calls it a standing desk. Poladko turned the dining room table into her workspace. When they have calls at the same time, Alleyne often retreats to the bathroom — just as he did in the hotel in western Ukraine. 

And when the couple’s Ukrainian nanny joined them in Warsaw, they developed a routine where she fell asleep in their bedroom while Alleyne and Poladko worked. In the early morning hours, after the couple finished up, they would switch spots, with the nanny sleeping on a tan couch in their otherwise barren living room. 

Ukraine meets Ghana in New Jersey

Alleyne and Poladko have been finding a way forward since 2005, when they met at the Camden campus of Rutgers University, in New Jersey while they each pursued master’s degrees. Poladko had earned a full ride through a fellowship that supports students from overseas. She clicked with Alleyne who, after completing his K-8 schooling in New Jersey, went to Ghana by himself to attend a boarding school. He could relate to Poladko’s experience as a non-native student navigating a thicket of challenges in order to reap educational — and life — opportunities. 

“To understand TeenSHARP, you have to understand Ukraine and Ghana,” Alleyne said with a laugh. “We’re tough.” 

Together, they decided to apply what they’d learned and help historically marginalized students access college and become student-leaders who are successful, high achieving, and reaching their potential (these traits stand for the SHARP in TeenSHARP). These students face hurdles during the entirety of the college process, from being encouraged to apply to colleges beneath their capabilities to , on average, than white students. 

TeenSHARP launched in 2009 with 10 students in the Philadelphia area, and has since expanded across New Jersey and Delaware, graduating more than 500 students and reaching thousands more in one-off programming. At points, Alleyne has taken on outside jobs, including a stint at the Delaware Department of Education and as the founding executive director of DelawareCAN, part of the that advocates for high-quality educational opportunities for all students, regardless of where they live. His salary from those roles allowed Poladko to donate hers back to TeenSHARP, she said, noting that she has not accepted any compensation from the group she co-founded. 

For TeenSHARPies, as they’re called, activities start in 9th grade. A seven-person team communicates with students and their families, offering sessions on the college application process and financial aid applications and promoting the idea of spending 33 hours a week on schoolwork. 

When the pandemic hit, TeenSHARP made its programs virtual and started serving students from across the United States, including Georgia, Ohio, Oregon and Texas. But the staff soon realized that remote instruction was causing their students’ math skills to falter. Alleyne, who as CEO oversees operations and development, reallocated $130,000 from their roughly $1 million annual budget— a “crazy amount of money,” for them, as Poladko said — to provide small-group tutoring. TeenSHARP is largely funded by a constellation of corporations and foundations that have offices in Wilmington, Delaware, including Capital One Bank and WSFS Bank. 

The heart of the program is the intensive advising that Poladko leads for high school juniors and seniors. While carrying a caseload of more than 70 students, Poladko provides one-on-one and group instruction. She estimates spending five to seven hours working with each student just on their personal statement. 

The goal is to be as well-prepared as a student from a wealthy family. TeenSHARP organizes more than two dozen college visits each year. Students are encouraged to apply early to their first choice, and Poladko is not above getting on the phone with an admissions counselor to lobby for one of her students. Lest they get saddled with debt, she encourages students to enroll in the college that is offering them the best overall package, not the best name recognition.

During the program’s College Signing Day event in May — starting at 6 p.m. Eastern, midnight in Warsaw — Poladko passed the Zoom spotlight from one student to another to tick through their acceptances and announce which they’d selected. One student had been accepted by 16 schools. Another by 17. 

“And who is getting your talent this fall?” Poladko asked. 

Back came the responses. 

Carleton College. 

Princeton. 

Yale. 

Macalester College. 

Poladko knows the acceptances — and the decision to attend the school that’s the best fit financially — are hard earned. The program has seen student outcomes remain consistent even through the shift away from in-person support. “Trust-building virtually is definitely not easy,” she said. “But it is definitely possible if students and parents see the commitment to students’ success.”

The couple took a brief pause in June before ramping up for a month-long summer program in July. In the meanwhile, they are still making rental payments on their house in Ukraine, which is 11 miles from Bucha, where the Russian military this spring . They’re paying partly to support the landlord, who recently sent them a video of the two-story property, their stroller still parked outside the front door, and partly because Alleyne and Poladko still hope to return there when it feels safe. They like the quality of life, and Poladko needs to fulfill a residency requirement for the fellowship she received before she can apply for U.S. citizenship.

“We could technically be in our house now,” Alleyne said. “You’re just living with this risk of an air strike.”

The couple is also — now more than $35,000 — that they donate to grassroots leaders and organizations in Ukraine. (Donations are processed through a nonprofit, ; designate Ukraine Grassroots Leaders Fund.)

Wherever they end up, Alleyne and Poladko are confident that TeenSHARP will continue to work with students and families to achieve racial and economic justice. Clarke, the Oberlin student, agrees. 

“It’s really hard to stop them from doing what they do,” he said. “A pandemic, war, they just keep going. It’s really inspirational. I think to myself, ‘If they can do that, then I think anyone can’ — or I don’t see it as impossible.”

This story was supported by a reporting grant from The Pulitzer Center.

A decade ago, Samuel Wallis was teaching in a small city in the Mississippi Delta when students’ phones started going off. News of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut stopped his class in its tracks.

“It was the middle of the school day … and we just had a crying session together,” recalled Wallis. “I was teaching social studies … like, I’m not going to [keep] teaching them the causes of World War II on that day.”

Looking back on that sad day now, Wallis says his emotional and unguarded experience as a Teach for America fellow strengthened those students’ trust in him and forged a classroom bond that ultimately made him a more effective instructor. It altered his approach to the classroom and the trajectory of his Mississippi work — and it was a powerful lesson about the value of deep connection that stayed with him when he later returned to the city of his childhood: Yonkers, New York. 

Now he puts relationship building at the center of his work, and sets out to weave empathy and human connection into everything he does as head of Yonkers Partners in Education (YPIE), a nonprofit that’s worked for over a decade to launch low-income students of color into college. By making higher education more accessible to Yonkers teens, many of whom are the first in their family to attend, the program has sent its participants to storied universities such as Duke, Howard and Georgetown. 

High school sophomore Marissa Dias originally joined YPIE (pronounced “why-pie”) seeking support in the college process, she said. But she became fast friends with another young woman who shared her sarcastic sense of humor and appreciated her nerdy jokes. 

“It was very easy to feel like I was right at home immediately,” Dias told The 74. “She really is my best friend and YPIE really built our friendship.”

On an afternoon in mid-January, Wallis picks up on a T-shirt Dias is wearing that spells “Ar-C-H-Er-Y” using elements from the periodic table. 

“Are you into Hawkeye?” the executive director asks, referring to the Marvel mini-series that came out over the holidays, which follows the story of a master archer from Avengers: Endgame. 

“Hawkeye? Yes,” Dias nods vigorously.

“How accurate was the archery? … Were you critiquing, like, their arm wasn’t up enough?”

“Some of the things they did were pretty crazy, but I thought it was accurate,” she says laughing.

Wallis is making his way around the YPIE College Zone, finding reasons to connect with every kid. He roves from desk to desk and chats with youth about everything from the viral internet game to the TV show Money Heist. 

The College Zone is a space separate from the city’s schools where students as young as ninth grade come in the afternoon for mentorship, tutoring and specialized instruction on their chosen topic area, known as a “major,” including science research, entrepreneurism and journalism. They also come to see their friends and plug back into this afternoon community. Pre-pandemic, as many as 150 high schoolers would come each day, but during COVID, attendance has generally been closer to 40, Wallis said. On this particular day in mid-January, as Omicron surged, roughly a dozen students spread out across the many tables. Some classrooms sat empty. 

Even at reduced capacity, though, there are giggles and chatter. Students snack on Goldfish and drink tea. Some graduates of the program are home from college for winter break and have come by to catch up with old friends and instructors, and share some of their campus experiences. 

Since joining the team in 2015, Wallis has worked to bake an ethos of community-building and belonging into the organization’s DNA, carefully designing each element of its programming to help youth feel that they are known and appreciated — and that they deserve to be there. Even seemingly small details such as classroom names, which are titled for well-known Yonkers streets like Nepperhan and McLean, are meant to add an extra touch of familiarity.

“We care about their college applications because you have to do that,” he explains. “But within that is a really important piece about relationship-building and feeling like you’re not going through it alone.”

The program is structured for continuity and long-term trust. The organization’s more than 250 adult volunteer mentors commit to working with students for at least four years, providing a consistent presence through high school. 

“Everything we do with volunteers is predicated on [the idea that] longer is better,” says Wallis. “Your second time meeting [a student], you’re not going to be best friends. … It takes time.”

Many high schoolers begin YPIE in ninth grade and stay through their second year of college. When they join, they’re paired with an adult mentor and work with YPIE staff to develop individualized learning plans called “” that take into account their skills and interests. As students approach the college application process, the organization schedules campus visits, provides SAT tutoring and guides them through applications and financial aid forms. 

And the results speak for themselves. YPIE, which has a $2 million annual budget, works with over 1,200 students from the city, or about 1 in 5 Yonkers high schoolers. In 2020, of YPIE graduates enrolled at a four-year college compared to 62 percent of peers from similar racial and socio-economic backgrounds.

The services address a pressing need in the 27,000-student district, part of the state’s . There are about in Yonkers schools — as the ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association. YPIE’s “college readiness managers” work in every public high school in the city to help fill in the gap.

“It’s so needed,” says Saunders High School Principal Steven Mazzola. “It’s been a great partnership to be able to reach more kids … because I think it gave them more exposure as to where they could go [to college].” 

Wallis spent his early years in Yonkers before his family moved to another nearby town for his middle and high school years. Many decades ago, his great-grandfather and grandfather used to work as mechanics fixing the city’s trolley cars in the very building where the YPIE College Zone is now located, he said.

But despite his deep Yonkers roots, it’s not lost on Wallis that he’s a white guy leading an organization serving students who, for the most part, don’t look like him.

“It’s probably the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about before I go to bed,” he says.

So he’s strategic about using what he calls a practice of “non-judgemental listening” to engage with students and let them drive the conversation. In a training for YPIE coaches, Wallis shows a YouTube video titled “.” In it, a woman — who has a carpenter’s nail jutting out of her forehead — shares about the pain she’s been having. A man listens, and after unsuccessfully suggesting that she remove the nail, settles on a simple response of, “That sounds really hard.”

It’s a comedic example, but one that Wallis believes illustrates a central truth about the style of mentorship to which he and his organization aspire. He has no interest in what he calls “finger-wagging.” Instead, he seeks to be a guide and a support.

Good mentors talk less, listen more and keep showing up, says Wallis. The program trains coaches not to pull away when students miss meetings or don’t respond to text messages, but rather to double down. In many cases, students may be going through something difficult, and it’s when they need support from the adults in their lives the most, the organization teaches its mentors. When youth get back in touch, coaches don’t chastise them for going M.I.A., but rather celebrate their return.

“One of the things we’ve really driven and trained staff to do is, if we finally are able to bring [a student] back, it’s not, ‘Where have you been?’ but ‘I’m so happy to see you,’” explains Wallis. 

It underscores the key message to students: “It’s OK to struggle. That’s when we’re gonna be there for you.”

Back at the College Zone, graduate Citlalli Rojas Huerta, who now attends Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut has returned to tutor students in the science research major — and she’s armed with evidence of her college success. She’s holding a printed copy of her first academic publication, the result of hours of work as a research assistant on a project examining approaches professors can take toward teaching STEM. 

That accomplishment, she says, is a testament to the impact YPIE has had on her life. She describes herself as having been a “shy, quiet kid,” when she joined, but opened up at YPIE thanks to Wallis’s support, giving her confidence and setting her on a trajectory to dream bigger.

“He really did help me, not just with things that were school-related, but emotionally as well,” she explains.

“The community here, it’s a beautiful thing,” adds college readiness manager Fatima Cisse, who is working with a group of three freshman girls on their anatomy homework in another classroom. Cisse herself was a student at YPIE years back and rejoined the community as a staff member during the pandemic.

“I think that’s one of the best things about YPIE is we’re just such a family,” she says.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and The 74.

Lead Image: YPIE Executive Director Samuel Wallis chats with students before the pandemic. (YPIE)

In the third and final survey of young people during the pandemic by the national nonprofit YouthTruth, 49 percent of students talked about the detrimental effects of growing mental and emotional issues while just 39 percent said they had an adult at school to whom they could turn for support. The gap in access to social and emotional help has widened even from fall 2020 survey data, at the start of students’ first full pandemic school year.

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YouthTruth Executive Director Jen Wilka said adult connection was actually at its highest at the start of emergency distance learning in spring 2020. Those interactions and energy, which students say is key to learning, are not as strong now a year and a half later, evidenced by the declining number of young people who say they have a supportive adult in their school orbit.

“Students really felt that increase in their teachers making an effort to sort of reach outside and beyond those virtual walls and understand what it is like,” Wilka said. “That has now waned, and is closer to normal, maybe a little bit higher than normal. We saw that really peak in spring 2020.”

One aspect of student-adult relationships in school that has improved over time is respect. Some 70 percent of students said they think adults treat youth with respect — up significantly from the 57 percent who believed that pre-pandemic.

A narrative animation compiles student write-in responses on stress, anxiety, and depression and how it affected their learning in 2020-21. (YouthTruth)

YouthTruth, which solicits student, family, and educator feedback, analyzed data from 206,950 third- through 12th-grade students across 19 states and 585 urban, suburban and rural schools. Open-ended and choice responses were solicited via anonymous 15-minute surveys from January through May 2021.

Previous pandemic-era surveys were conducted in 2020 by YouthTruth from (20,000 students) and (85,170 students). Mental health concerns have consistently been a barrier to learning, and high school seniors’ plans post-graduation continue to be affected by the pandemic. Students have been vocal about the importance of building relationships with their teachers, and their sense of belonging within their school community peaked in fall 2020.

Twenty-one percent of those most recently surveyed attend high-poverty schools, similar to the national average of 25 percent, and students’ racial identities mirror national averages.

For students of all gender identities, depression, stress, and anxiety has become more prevalent as a barrier to learning since fall 2020. For female- and non-binary identifying students, the rates are much higher, 60 and 83 percent, respectively.

Youth cite overwhelming workloads with assignments that lack relevance to their daily life and futures, according to write-in responses and qualitative analysis.

“School restricts me from being content with who I am,” one high school upperclassman shared. “We need to radically change the education system, it’s way overdue for that and it needs to right now. I cannot get out of bed anymore. I hate school more than how I used to. I’m mentally strained because of distance learning […] However, an English assignment and 11 other assignments are due by 11:59pm tonight because grades are so important – more important than surviving and finding new healthy coping mechanisms after all.”

Education leaders across the country are seeking ways to ameliorate growing concerns for students’ emotional and social well-being; a number of states plan to utilize American Rescue Plan funds to bolster mental health access.

In the North Clackamas School District, serving the greater Portland, Oregon area, social and mental health services were established pre-COVID yet leaders saw emotional needs grow during the pandemic. In response to the changing ways students needed access to adults and sought connection, the district partnered with providers and nonprofits to offer telehealth services, devices, and hotspots to youth and their families districtwide.

Through the pandemic, the district sought to make “sure that we had established pathways that were normalized, made very typical and open for families to access a mental health therapist,” Dr. Shelly Reggiani, the district’s director of equity and instruction, told The 74 during a YouthTruth press call last week.

In sharing other ways to remove learning barriers and improve engagement, youth said they’d like to see more real-world topics, like applying for higher education, financial aid, and jobs and learning personal finance.

Survey results show that fewer seniors surveyed this spring will head to four-year institutions this fall, a trend also reflected by declining enrollment rates, which saw the worst single-year decline since 2011. And though more will enroll in two-year colleges than in fall 2020 — about 20 percent of those surveyed — the proportion hasn’t yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

Qualitative survey data revealed some of the barriers that persist for high schoolers looking to access higher education. Students recognized “the need for social capital (like from a teacher or sibling) as part of college access,” the confusing nature of the application process, which is typically formally taught during the school day, and felt that finding information and choosing to apply came “too late,” YouthTruth researchers told The 74.

“The school is pushing students to go to a four-year college and for most students they don’t want to go to a four-year college because they don’t want to go into debt,” one student said.

“Give us Pathways for the Future,” one of four video animations depicting trends from 480,000 open-ended responses and reflections on the 2020-21 academic year. (YouthTruth)

“They’re really searching for meaning in learning, and that’s an opportunity for us as educators to connect learning, and real life, and relevance to help address students’ needs here,” Sonya Heisters, YouthTruth’s deputy director, said.

Other notable findings

• Secondary school students’ perceptions of learning and belonging returned to pre-pandemic levels
• Many Spanish-speaking students detailed how language barriers became an additional obstacle to their learning during virtual and hybrid environments, and 21 percent of Hispanic/Latino students cited lack of teacher support as an obstacle to learning compared to just 14 percent of other students.
• Providing inclusive curricula, adopting anti-racist policies, and treating students fairly are common recommendations found among data from 5,000 Black / African-American students.
• Many students enjoyed paper-free learning, and hope to maintain access to online materials with the return to in-person school
• Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino students report feeling unsafe in school at higher rates than their peers, at 11 and 16 percent respectively vs. 9 percent for non-Black, non-Hispanic students.
• 65 percent of students report that their teachers give extra help when needed, but this is more common among students who receive high academic grades

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to YouthTruth and The 74.