News

NPEA Names Karin Elliott as Director

New National Coalition, Launched by The Steppingstone Foundation, Committed to Sharing Best Practices in Supporting Minority Achievement and Educational Access

BOSTON, January 28, 2008 – The National Partnership for Educational Access (NPEA) has named Karin Elliott as director. NPEA is a membership organization for programs working in collaboration with independent and public college preparatory schools to provide underrepresented students with academic preparation, placement services and counseling and ongoing support to ensure enrollment at four-year colleges. NPEA was launched in late 2007 by The Steppingstone Foundation in Boston as a collaborative action tank to share best practices and ensure innovation in the field of school placement.

Elliot joins NPEA from Summerbridge Cambridge, where she was most recently the executive director. Prior to Summerbridge, Karin was the director of training and technical assistance at Horizons for Homeless Children, where she traveled across the country speaking about child and family homelessness. Karin also spent five years working for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services on Head Start, education, and human service issues. Karin has a M. Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a MSW from Boston College.

“We are thrilled to welcome someone with Karin’s varied experience to work as a leader and liaison with the member organizations,” said Michael P. Danziger, Steppingstone’s President. “NPEA was initiated by John Klingenstein who saw many of the educational access programs funded by his family struggle with the same issues such as recruiting black and Latino boys and supporting boarding school enrollment. When we first convened representatives from similar organizations over a year ago, it was evident that there was both a need and an interest in information-sharing, collaborative action, and dissemination of lessons learned. We look forward to benefiting from Karin’s knowledge as well as the synergies among these fantastic programs from across the county.”

NPEA’s goal is to reach a day when all students have equal access to high-quality education and opportunities for college and beyond. This unique community of organizations and school-based programs - currently 38 strong, including A Better Chance and Prep for Prep - share many characteristics, including common stakeholders, a commitment to high-quality support for motivated schoolchildren, and a core set of values anchored in educational access and equity.

Patrick Bassett, President of the National Association for Independent Schools, has expressed his support of NPEA. “The time is now for NPEA. This initiative presents a great opportunity for educational access programs from across the country to work together to serve underrepresented students. The demographic of students of color comprises most of the growth in the school-age population in our country today. The importance of independent schools in accepting traditionally underrepresented students cannot be emphasized enough. We can all benefit from this action --¬ schools, families and most importantly, students.”

NPEA is dedicated to fostering quality, success, and growth amongst member organizations, partner schools, and communities committed to educational access. Since 1957 when the Boys’ Club of New York first began preparing and placing underserved low-income students into area independent schools, this community of organizations has served close to 40,000 students and families.

NPEA has been made possible through the support of The Goldman Sachs Foundation, the Esther A. & Joseph Klingenstein Fund, and The Steppingstone Foundation. Founding NPEA member organizations include The Aspire Program at Hathaway Brown School (Cleveland, OH), High Jump (Chicago, IL), New Jersey SEEDS, Inc. (Newark, NJ), Prep@Pingree (Hamilton, MA), REACH Prep (Stamford, CT), The Wight Foundation (Newark, NJ), and Rainier Scholars (Seattle, WA), along with The Steppingstone Foundation (Boston, MA).

“All of our schools – public and independent - are better off, indeed our country is better off, if we level the dramatically uneven playing field of educational opportunity. With NPEA we've taken a big step in that direction,” noted Steve Filosa, Director of Prep@Pingree (The Pingree School, Hamilton, MA).