Congressman Fattah to Keynote GEAR UP Event

Program creator to urge over 300 students to continue along the path to college 

PHILADELPHIA, May 29, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-PA), whose college readiness programs have prepared millions of young people for higher education, will keynote the GEAR UP and AVID end-of-year event at Temple University's Student Center, 1755 N. 13th St., on Wed., May 30, at 10:30 a.m.

Fattah, creator of Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), the largest pre-college awareness program in the nation, will address 350 students from 30 schools across the city. The sixth-through-ninth graders are participants in a GEAR UP-funded program called Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), a college readiness system designed to increase school-wide learning and performance.

"There is a close working connection between GEAR UP and AVID," said Fattah, who will help to highlight some of AVID's best and brightest students and teachers.  "The AVID program helps to carry out the overall mission of GEAR UP in hundreds of schools nationally, getting tens of thousands of young people to and through college. These students are brilliant, and their individual determination will go a long way toward deciding their futures, but I'm confident that they'll continue to achieve at a high level, because they've already done so through this program."

AVID, now in year two of implementation in the School District of Philadelphia as part of the GEAR UP Partnership grant, has a long and successful history. Nationwide statistics provided by AVID (http://avid.org) indicate that since 1990, more than 110,000 AVID students graduated from high school and planned to attend college. Approximately 95 percent of AVID high school graduates enroll in college with more than 60 percent enrolled in four-year colleges. AVID graduates persist in college at an 89 percent rate. 

The GEAR UP program has directed almost $4 billion in federal resources to programs like AVID in 49 states as well as U.S. territories since Fattah guided GEAR UP into law in 1998.  As a result, GEAR UP has prepared 12 million low income and underserved young people for college.  

SOURCE Office of Congressman Chaka Fattah