Local junior high school students will get a small taste of college life on April 7-8 when the Pathways to Possibilities program at Calvin College hosts "A Day and Night with the Calvin Mosaic." 
The students will stay in Calvin's Mosaic residence hall, which was set up to help Calvin students "explore the diversity within the kingdom of God as represented in God's world and through God's diverse peoples." 
The event will begin at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 7 with the Calvin Fieldhouse serving as a "drop zone." At 5:30 dinner will be served in the on-campus dining hall and from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Calvin physical recreation students will lead the local students in group activities. 
From 9 to 10:30 p.m. the program will shift gears slightly as the participants watch a movie and have a discussion on stereotypes and their impact on society. From 11 p.m. to midnight the topic will be "Building an Ideal Society" and that time will include small group exercises and group presentations. 
Saturday's activities will begin bright and early with 9 a.m. devotions. From 9:30 to noon there will be Cultural Sessions, which will include the opportunity to attend such workshops as Japanese Characters, Exploring African Influence on Music, or Ancient Asian practices. The program will conclude with lunch. 
Pathways to Possibilities sees Calvin partner with churches in Grand Rapids, Holland and Muskegon in an effort to help at-risk youth stay excited about education. The program is funded by Herman Miller, Inc., and Meijer. 
When the Pathways to Possibilities program began in January 1997 the goals were broad. At the time academic dean Steve Timmermans said: "We hope and pray that inner city children and adolescents will value learning, seek academic success and higher education, become aware of career opportunities and strive to live responsible lives. We will work together with homes, schools, churches and the college to nurture students and help them realize their potential." 
After three years of work Timmermans and Rhae-Ann Booker, Director of Pre-College Programs at Calvin (above), say the goals are being met. There are almost 1,400 young people in the "Possibilities pipeline" right now. 
Booker and Timmermans believes that better than 80 percent of those young people will graduate from high school and go on to some sort of post-secondary education. Why do they believe that? Because in the three years that Possibilities has existed there have been 82 youth that have been in the program and reached post high school age. Almost 80 percent (65 of the 82) went on to post-secondary education, either community college, four-year college or vocational school. That total includes eight who went to Calvin and 61 of 65 who continued their schooling in the state of Michigan. 
"The Possibilities program is working," says Timmermans. "We're just starting to see the first wave of results now with students coming out of high school in small numbers. But in the next three years we will see greater and greater numbers of Possibilities kids graduating high school and going on to college."