New Fellowship Program Elevates Leaders Behind Push to Eliminate Barriers for First-Year College Students

Strong Start to Finish names six changemakers to its initial cohort of "First-Year Success Fellows"—state policymakers, faculty, and academic leaders working to remove barriers to student success in the critical first year of college

DENVER, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Strong Start to Finish—a national network dedicated to ensuring students complete gateway math and English in their first year of college and an initiative of Education Commission of the States—today named six leaders from state higher education systems and institutions of higher education as its inaugural First-Year Success Fellows.
Bringing decades of on-the-ground experience in classroom instruction, student success and research, the Fellows will spend the coming year briefing policymakers and state leaders on effective reform strategies, engaging fellow faculty and practitioners to guide implementation, and elevating the evidence base for what works in gateway math and English.

"For far too long, too many students have been placed into prerequisite courses that delay their progress instead of accelerate it," said Victoria Ballerini, Ph.D., director of Strong Start to Finish. "These fellows are helping states and colleges redesign the critical first year of college around what evidence clearly shows students need to succeed: defined pathways, meaningful support, and immediate access to credit-bearing coursework."

Colleges across the country are still placing more than a million students each year into costly noncredit developmental coursework that most never complete — and fewer than 1 in 10 will ever finish a gateway math or English course through traditional remediation. At the same time, states and institutions are increasingly moving away from traditional developmental models because research has consistently shown those approaches often delay or derail student progress. In Louisiana, for example, the elimination of remedial coursework drove a nearly five-fold increase in gateway math pass rates.

Selected for their accomplishments in advancing evidence-based reforms that improve student success, the First-Year Success Fellows are emerging leaders who are not only experts within their own state systems and campuses—but also influential within the broader field of developmental education reform and status success. Over the next year, Strong Start to Finish will engage the Fellows as part of an ambitious public awareness campaign designed to educate media, policymakers, practitioners, and the public about the importance of proven developmental education reform practices.

The Fellows will play a critical role in advancing Strong Start to Finish's ambitious North Star goal of ensuring that by 2040 every state will put every student on track to graduate after their first year. The initial members of the First-Year Success Fellows cohort, include (in alphabetical order):

• Dr. Tristan Denley, Deputy Commissioner for Academic Affairs and Innovation, Louisiana Board of Regents. Led the statewide elimination of remedial coursework in Louisiana's public colleges, and universities, driving a nearly five-fold increase in gateway math pass rates over the 11% rate seen in 2020–21. Denley has more than two decades of senior higher education leadership experience across systems in Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana, replacing traditional remediation with a corequisite math and English framework in all three states.
  
  
• James Gray, Dean, Math Division, Pima Community College. Leads scaled co-requisite remediation and math pathway redesign at one of the nation's largest community colleges. Before joining Pima in 2022, Gray spent two decades at the Community College of Aurora aligning developmental and gateway math with data-informed practices. As an affiliate with the Center for Urban Education at USC's Rossier School of Education, he worked with practitioners to examine their own teaching practices as means to address racial inequities in outcomes.
  
  
• Dr. Amy Moreland, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, Tennessee Board of Regents. Helped build the policy and research infrastructure behind Tennessee's scaling of corequisite remediation across all 37 community and technical colleges — one of the country's strongest state-level student success records. In 2022, she launched the Tennessee Coaching Project, a statewide initiative that embeds success coaching and career advising directly into courses to support adult learners and populations historically facing greater barriers to completion.
  
  
• Rain Newcomb, English Department, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. Spearheaded the comprehensive redesign of developmental English and Math courses, consulted with colleges across Minnesota State on equity‑centered remedial reform, and created and facilitated cross‑sector workshops with secondary math and English partners to bridge the transition from high school to college. Newcomb has built her teaching practice around Indigenous and rural students — populations too often missing from the national conversation on student success.
  
  
• Sean Newmiller, Chair of the English, Communication, and World Languages Department, Lake Michigan College. Led his department in fully scaling a co-requisite English model and implementing guided self-placement that eliminates reliance on high-stakes standardized testing and traditional remedial coursework. Newmiller has served as a subject matter expert on statewide developmental education reforms, working with legislatures, community college associations, tribal colleges, and university systems across Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Oregon.
  
  
• Summer Serpas, Professor of English, Irvine Valley College. A frequent presenter on California's AB 705 implementation for colleges and statewide higher education systems, Serpas has led campus-level remediation reform and supported college students in completing transfer-level English within their first year. As Assistant Director of the California Acceleration Project from 2016 to 2023, she led statewide professional development and worked with faculty, administrators, state legislators, and the Board of Governors to transform English and math programs.

To learn more about the Strong Start to Finish First-Year Success Fellows program, visit StrongStart.org.

About Strong Start to Finish: An initiative of the Education Commission of the States, Strong Start to Finish (Strong Start) partners with a network of experts, researchers, advocates, and funders to implement and scale evidence-based practices that ensure every college student has equal opportunity to succeed in the first year of college—and beyond. As a trusted convener, funder, connector, and amplifier of evidence-based reforms, Strong Start champions a three-pronged approach by redesigning college placement, expanding access to corequisite learning support, and aligning math pathways with each student's program of study. With Strong Start's support, states and institutions have reduced wasted costs, increased student enrollment and persistence, and expanded pathways to career and economic mobility.

About Education Commission of the States: Education Commission of the States (ECS) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for attaining education excellence for all by helping state leaders identify, develop, and implement public education policy that addresses the current and future needs of a learning society. Learn more at ecs.org.

SOURCE Strong Start to Finish