College bound

With a grant from the Cape Girardeau Schools Foundation, Central High School librarian Julia Jorgensen has set up a series of meetings for minority students planning to go to college. The students' parents attend the meetings as well. They are meant to teach both students and their parents about scholarships and admission guidelines.

The program was created as a response to the wide achievement gap between black and white students on both the national and local levels.

Central principal Dr. Mike Cowan says there are a number of reasons why the program was started by Jorgensen instead of the school's counselors. She is the school's most experienced grant writer, he said. Cowan said the school's counseling staff was trimmed by one-fourth during the district's latest budget cuts, increasing the remaining counselors' caseloads.

Jorgensen also founded and runs the communitywide reading program United We Read. In both cases she has perceived a community need and done something about it.