JumpStart Emphasizes New Students' Cultural Wealth

For many of us who have lived, worked, or grown up in Pasadena, we are familiar with a cultural shorthand of the area: Lake Street is the place for an afternoon stroll or cold drink, the Huntington is perfect for a weekend day trip, and don’t forget Pie ’n Burger for lunch. But for Poly’s newest students, the offhand reference to Lucky Boy might catch them off guard.

Enter JumpStart, an enrichment program offered to incoming ninth-graders new to independent schools in support of their transition into Poly’s Upper School. JumpStart provides fundamentals to academic success in English, Integrated Science, and Ethnic Studies;  it also addresses the sometimes overlooked aspects of what it feels like to be an outsider at an independent school—which sometimes looks like where to get lunch. 

Dr. Nathan Stogdill, 9th grade dean and Upper School English faculty, who has taught in the program for the past two summers, now serves as the inaugural program director and unofficial snack coordinator. To create comfort in the classroom, Dr. Stogdill asked students to share their favorite snacks with responses like gushers, conchas, and frozen grapes. He’s also worked hard to ensure students are well fed with Pasadena favorites like Shake Shack.

“We feel it's important for our students to develop some navigational capital by seeing and doing things that the people who have been in Poly or independent schools in Pasadena have experience with,” he said. “We've been ordering lunch every day from restaurants around here. People will talk about Lucky Boy, so we want to give them that familiarity.”

For three weeks, JumpStart scholars have participated in coursework that builds foundational skills and embarked on field trips and group explorations of Pasadena and surrounding areas to become more familiar with the communities in which we live and learn. One of these trips was a visit to an escape room where the students learned how to problem solve together, similar to how they will work together for the next four years. There is also a group of JumpStart Teaching Fellows or current Poly students who participated in the program in prior years.  

“The students who are new to Poly, often from non-independent schools, are some of the brightest students we have,” he said. “For the first couple of years, I started to rethink the purpose of JumpStart, that it should really be a program that celebrates the strengths that these students bring into our community, not remediate or emphasize their perceived deficits.”

Dr. Stogdill is joined by Dr. Michaela Mares-Tamayo ’99, Melisa Luis ’22, and Admission Outreach Associate Vince Oliver who offer program support. For a look inside the classroom, Melisa, who teaches science, proposed a simple unit conversion question: calculate how far your home is from Poly in miles, yards, and feet. When students completed their conversions Melisa posed another question: how is your neighborhood different from Poly? 

Melisa shared her own personal experience at Poly, coming from a community that didn’t share many similarities with the area. Her experience allowed the conversation to open up in the classroom about concerns and anxieties about entering a new school, creating a sense of safety and belonging. Melisa’s question also involves building community and awareness of the cultural wealth the students already have and are bringing to Poly.

While visiting JumpStart on a recent Wednesday, the students shared a long table on Arden Lawn. They enjoyed lunch, swapped stories, and shared jokes. It’s hard to believe that just two weeks ago they were meeting for the first time.

One leadership fellow, a former newcomer to Poly, shared, “I wish I had JumpStart coming into my freshman year because it was really difficult making friends from a public school and knowing that a lot of these kids have been friends with each other since kindergarten. During COVID, I didn’t have any of these past opportunities to meet people in person. This is really beneficial to getting a jumpstart in friendships and relationships.”