MORGANTOWN - Nearly 500 educators came to Morgantown for a two-day Student Success Summit, a conference that tries to connect the dots between educators of every grade, from preschool all the way through college.
Here, students aren't seen as passive recipients in the education system. They are not just kids to be taught at for eight hours a day. They are partners in education, a source of new ideas and an opportunity to try new things.
Several of the panels and even the keynote address from Mark Moore, director of the state Department of Education's Employee Development Center, highlighted ways teachers can let the questions students have about the world drive their curriculum.
So a couple of years ago, some of the staff members at the Higher Education Policy Commission, the group that co-sponsors the summit with the Department of Education, had a bright idea.
With a newly secured grant through the federal government's GEAR UP program, staff members at the commission figured the best way to really cement the importance of a college-going culture would be to make the students part of the process.
Thus was born the HEROs program, a growing statewide group of high school students who try to encourage their friends to go to college. Melissa Gattuso, the commission's College Access and Success Program Director, said the whole thing was a no-brainer, really.
The idea was simple. Bring together some of the brightest students from schools all across the state, train them to be quasi-guidance counselors, send them back to their schools and wait. They call them Higher Education Resource Officers, or HEROs for short.
The students go through a training process during the Student Success Summit where they learn how to be leaders and how to effect change at their schools. They're asked to critically evaluate what challenges students at their own schools might have for going to college.
Then, when they go back to school, they are charged with convincing their friends that, yes, some type of post-secondary education is important for everyone's life and that yes, it can be accessible.
"Whenever you have an adult telling you something, it's almost like you're taking it for half of what it's actually worth," said Ikie Brooks, 20. "There's just not that connection there. But if you have your friend who you eat lunch with sit down and tell you you can go to college, that makes a big difference."
Brooks is a junior at Marshall University and one of the original HEROs. He was a bright kid who always got good grades at Boone County's Scott High School. He always knew he was going to go to college one day, but he didn't always know how he would pay for it.
Brooks remembers one of his friends who was smart, too, but never even imagined she would go to college. None of her family had gone before her, so she really had no clue how people actually paid for it.
When the HEROs came to their school, he convinced her to come to a meeting one night after class. She and her grandmother stayed for nearly three hours after the meeting to talk with HEPC college counselors.
Now, she's finishing up her nursing degree.
Students can join the HERO program at any time, so long as their school already has a club. The first step to getting that club going is to send students to this annual conference. The commission brings in leadership experts to kick off the HEROs' training.
Jessica Kennedy, HEPC's spokeswoman, and others involved with the program said it's important to start off with leadership training because many students from low-income communities aren't as confident in their abilities as they could be, and they need that boost before they can start helping others.
"What's great about these students is they truly believe that education is a key to not only their success, but to their peers, too. They can see how it all relates back to their community," Gattuso said. "They're getting trained right now to be their authentic selves so other people will trust them more so they can have those conversations and lead other students.
"It's the heart of the HEROs that's great, and I don't know how you can put that down on paper."
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.