Earn A’s, B’s, get free college: A scholarship challenge for sixth-graders

For 22 sixth-graders from Bellwood, it’s the chance -- and challenge -- of a lifetime: If they can get all A’s and B’s throughout middle school and high school, stay out of trouble and graduate, they’ll earn a college scholarship worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to Concordia University in River Forest.

Fifth Third Bank is sponsoring the program, which includes free tuition, room, board and books at Concordia, where tuition is nearly $30,000. It’s likely to cost substantially more when these kids start college, around 2015, though Concordia plans to offer a steep discount.

The students will get laptops loaded with learning software and will have access to free tutoring from students and faculty at Concordia, mentors, free summer-school courses and even paid summer jobs. And their parents can attend courses in financial fitness at Fifth Third Bank.

The program is the idea of Tom Jandris, Concordia’s graduate school dean, and Terry Zinc, former president of Fifth Third Bank in Chicago, now a top national officer of the bank. Jandris said they wanted to help students from a low-income, diverse area go to college.

”We are trying to create a lighthouse effect, where the interventions will ripple out across the district and hopefully the nation,” he said.

He said they looked at schools around the Chicago area and settled on Bellwood’s Roosevelt Middle School and Proviso West High School in Hillside, where Jandris went to school and later was principal. Only 20 percent of Proviso students meet state testing standards.

Other scholarships have targeted Chicago Public Schools and top students in the north suburbs. “They sometimes forget there is a pocket of need right between the two,’’ said Alexis West, the principal of Proviso West.