UW-Madison PEOPLE Program Is Present for the Students: Through Thick and Thin
Top: The UW-Madison PEOPLE Program Cohort of 2024 on Bascom Hill on July 27, 2023 Above: Interim PEOPLE Program Director Kia Hunter
By Jonathan Gramling
On August 1, Kia Hunter became the interim director of the UW-Madison PEOPLE Program, following in the footsteps of Jacqueline DeWalt, Gail Ford and Shanee McCoy. And like her predecessors, the work that Hunter does is personal.
“I am super excited to step into this role as interim director,” Hunter said. “I look forward to really working with our scholars and hopefully helping UW-Madison be a place that they can call home. I love our program. I strongly believe in the work that we do. I call our scholars ‘My Little Starfish.’ I love my starfish, pre-college and college. I’m excited to see what the school year brings.”
Hunter is no stranger to PEOPLE. She started as the prep and middle school coordinator in 2014 and rose to become the Madison associate coordinator by January 2020. Shanee McCoy —who was the associate director at the time for Milwaukee — and Hunter were placed in charge of the program when Gail Ford went on maternity leave. And then COVID-19 hit.
“It was a perfect storm,” Hunter said. “We had just gotten our roles. Our director was on maternity leave. And all of a sudden, the world shut down. So we worked with the associate vice-provost was Dr. Cheryl Giddens and she said, ‘I want us to figure out a way to still serve the students.’ Shanee and I said, ‘We’re on it.’ It took us about six weeks. For six weeks, I worked with my staff. They were amazing, coming up with ideas and brainstorming. We had a lot of long meetings. It was a lot of work. There was a lot of, ‘Can we do this? This is uncharted waters. Is this allowed at the university?’ And we worked with the school districts to make sure that we weren’t superseding a policy of some sort put in place by MPS and MMSD. And we finally came up with a solution. We rolled it out to parents and families. And we started serving our students within 30 days of the university shutting down. We were doing it via Microsoft Teams. And so we entered the wonderful world of Teams during COVID-19 and we haven’t turned back since. We learned some very valuable best practices.”
In essence, PEOPLE provided the students what it had always offered them, personal growth activities and support, but now they were in the virtual world.
“During COVID-19, we were still able to offer our Academic Centers for Enrichment based upon their school schedules,” Hunter said. “We wanted the students to still have an opportunity to be educated and not feel the divide so much. So we offered during the time they had homeroom or study hall, we offered them time to log in. And we had our college readiness mentors, our tutors, available to help them to refresh their memories about things that they may have lost over the months. We had a college readiness team building activities for the students. And we even had our virtual summer program. We kept the summer program even during COVID-19. We still hired instructors to come and we asked them to be creative in engaging students in a virtual capacity. And they did. We have videos of internships that still happened.”
While COVID-19 disrupted the program, it also offered some opportunities.
“We were able to expand our partnerships in COVID-19 because now I could get a senator from Minnesota to talk with them because he didn’t necessarily have to be on-site,” Hunter said. “We were able to expand to some folks in Washington, D.C. to talk to the students about policies and thigs of that sort. It was a really, really enlightening to have our students exposed to global leadership and not just local leadership. We would expose our students to the law, but it was local leaders. And it is very important for them to know their local leaders because those are the folks who work for them. But I also want them to know global leaders, a whole slew of people who are in office and work for them and this is how you talk with them. That was very enlightening for that cohort of students.”
While the program returned to in-person for the most part last year, components that were created during the pandemic remained.
“The parents are working multiple jobs or working second shift, they can’t always be present, but they want to be present,” Hunter said. “And so we offer a lot of our parent services online — our professional development opportunities and our orientation. They are still virtual. Parents, no matter if they are at their job and they want to log in and put it in their ear, they can still hear information. We still keep those virtual.”
While the PEOPLE Program summer program tried to come back in 2022, it was cut short when some COVID-19 cases began to show up amongst students and staff. But this summer, approximately 700-800 PEOPLE high school scholars again came to the UW-Madison campus for enrichment classes and internships. And the PEOPLE cohorts are bigger than ever.
“We have 144 students present for 2024 Cohort,” Hunter said. “Our upcoming senior class is about 140-144 students. Our 2026 cohort is close to 200 students, perhaps 198. Our 2025 cohort is about 175. And for our incoming class, Madison is established at 101. I have 101 new students coming in to our PEOPLE family whom we just recruited in eighth grade. And they have their summer program in Madison this summer. And then Milwaukee is currently recruiting that cohort of students. So we will have identified the Milwaukee part of that cohort by October. Our goal is to have a 200 cohort each year.”
And they are still taking advantage of the PEOPLE high school offerings that guide them to a successful college education.
“They will still have Academic Center for Enrichment,” Hunter said. “They will still be open to all of our students, 9-12th grade. We’ll also do college visits during the school year. We’ll do numerous cultural enrichment activities. They have a very robust schedule that we try to plan for the school year, especially for the times when they are out of school. We’ll offer some thrill-seeking activities or something to keep them busy and engaged in the learning process even when school is out.”
And the PEOPLE high school component has been successful in guiding students to UW-Madison.
“For our last cohort, we had about 130 seniors in the 2023 class,” Hunter said. “Of those, 87 were admitted to UW-Madison. And of that 87, 77 of them are enrolled for this fall.”
And once they leave UW-Madison, PEOPLE Scholars have been making their mark on the world.
“Our scholars are definitely doing some amazing things,” Hunter said. “Global leadership is one of the pillars of our college program. And I am really, really happy to say our scholars are becoming global leaders. Some representative graduates include Aaron Olson who is an astrophysicist for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center, Tiffany Jones who obtained her medical degree, Larry Love who is a school principal, Maichou Lor who is an assistant professor of Nursing, Ana Baez who is a high school counselor, Wquinton Smith who is the assistant director of inclusion for UW Athletics and Franella Ngaboh-Smart who works for TikTok.”
Just as its graduates make their mark on the world, PEOPLE continues to leave a indelible mark on the UW-Madison campus.
