AVID College Prep Sets Students Up for Success

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. - A college prep course is changing the lives of local high school students. The class is called AVID or Advancement Via Individual Determination. Its a nationwide program, but one Robbinsdale school watched its first successful graduating class.

Many of the young people start the AVID class their freshman year. Now, all 20 kids in this year's class graduated and are going to college.

The kids come as struggling students with average grades and little support. Erica Gullickson teaches the class for one hour a day.

Students like, Nikka Shipp, call it a life class. Nikka says she had been to more than a dozen schools before this one because she moved so much due to family domestic violence.

She says AVID helped her solve problems in other classes and get better grades. It uses a special curriculum which teaches students how to take notes, how to ask questions, and students have tutors.

Now Nikka will attend North Dakota State University and its fully paid for. She says her peers in AVID helped her achieve success, but she made the final decision herself.

Nikka says, "somewhere along that journey I took I had to be an individual and had to take the journey for myself it wasn't enough that my mom and Ms. Gullickson wanted it for me, I had to do it for myself and I think at somepoint in everyone's life you have to want it for yourself."

Nikka says some of her other teachers have been able to incorporate the AVID curriculum into some of their classes.

Nikka was awarded a $20,000 dollar scholarship that she'll use for grad school to become a lawyer.

She has been chosen to talk to 20,000 AVID teachers in Chicago next month about her amazing success story.