Charleston is one of 22 metropolitan areas nationwide to receive a $55,000 grant geared toward getting more high school seniors to complete the paperwork to get financial aid.
The grant, from the National College Access Network, was announced Tuesday morning by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. The award comes as the commission celebrates earlier news that, according to NCAN, West Virginia was one of only four states in the country to increase its number of students who completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
The federal government requires every student to submit the form before receiving any federal financial aid; many other scholarships also require it.
The money, which comes from a $1.6 million grant by the Kresge Foundation, challenges cities in urban areas like Charleston to increase financial aid application rates by 5 percent for high school seniors graduating in 2017.
"We know FAFSA completion is strongly associated with postsecondary enrollment, yet every year millions of students who are eligible for aid never complete the FAFSA," said Bill Moses, Kresge's managing director for education, in a news release. "That's especially true for low-income students who could use the federal assistance the most."
Higher Education Policy Commission spokeswoman Jessica Kennedy said NCAN identified a list of cities that would be eligible for the grant money. From there, any organization within the city was allowed to apply for funding with an idea as to how it might help more students complete their financial aid application.
Jon Duffy, director of counseling and testing for Kanawha County Schools, said part of the money will go toward creating mobile FAFSA units, which can help families who might not have strong access to the internet. The mobile units will be based out of Kanawha school buses equipped with wireless internet. They might be brought to a high school football or another community-centered event, but the goal will remain the same: help students and their families complete FAFSA.
The College Foundation of West Virginia, using data from the U.S. Department of Education, reports the average statewide completion of FAFSA is 52 percent.
In Kanwaha County, George Washington High School has the highest completion rate with 66 percent of its seniors completing the application and Riverside High School has the lowers with only 44 percent.
"Letting us focus on one county for this issue, as this money does, will allow us to come up with and pilot some really new ideas and see how they work," Kennedy said, which can then be scaled up to see how those ideas might help students across all of West Virginia.
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.