A Second Family, a Limitless Future

BY THE TIME Essence Jordan ’05 reached high school, she’d already endured enough adversity for a lifetime. During a childhood marked by abuse, she frequently moved between relatives’ homes.

Yet teachers at the struggling and now-shuttered Southern High in Baltimore, where she started 10th grade, soon noticed her sterling grades, involvement in extracurriculars and determination to go to college.

During Jordan’s senior year, en route to becoming salutatorian, a guidance counselor approached her about a new scholarship at the University of Maryland. It would allow her not only to attend for free—tuition, room and board, and books would all be covered—but to get an unprecedented level of support as part of a group of similarly promising city public high school students who had persevered, often through the toughest of circumstances.

Jordan was thrilled to learn she’d been accepted into the Incentive Awards Program. “In my family, my first cousins and I were the first generation to go to college. My grandma
had an eighth-grade education. Everybody was happy for me.”

Southwestern Senior High School in Baltimore, shuttered in 2007, wasn’t known for producing college-bound students, says Myron Goldstein. “It was more of, ‘Let’s just get these kids ready to enter the workforce.’” But in eighth grade, he had visited a different high school, one “where students were happy to be,” showing him the possibility of a better kind of education.

Guidance counselors at Southwestern helped him identify college scholarships. His family and school community were “ecstatic” to find out that he’d been accepted to UMD through IAP, he says. “When they did the morning announcements (at school), the teacher reading the announcements read my entire acceptance letter. I could hear his voice cracking.”

At Maryland, Goldstein started out shy and quiet. Lee encouraged him to push aside his nerves to try different clubs and activities. “I learned to be a person that’s adaptable to change,” he says. “A lot of those things I was able to translate into my career.”

Now a supervisor in denials and appeals at Johns Hopkins Health System, Goldstein says IAP changed the trajectory of his life. “It’s an impactful program that really helps a lot of kids see the goal of a college degree as attainable.”

Born in Nigeria, Ima Ibidapo always planned on pursuing higher education. “With Nigerians, from your mother’s womb you already know you’re going to college. It’s just a matter of where,” she says.

Her parents spent time in the Baltimore area as young adults—they met at Morgan State University—so when Ibidapo was around 13, they returned from Nigeria to the city, where several relatives lived, seeking better educational opportunities for their children. Ibidapo went to an all-girls public high school and earned several scholarships. She was hesitant to attend UMD, thinking the campus was too big for her, but IAP’s full ride steered her to College Park.

Once at Maryland, Ibidapo found that the kinship among her cohort transformed a big school into an intimate community. “If I didn’t have IAP, my adjustment to college life would have been more challenging,” she says.

After graduating from UMD, Ibidapo earned a J.D. from William and Mary Law School. Now, her one-woman firm focuses on immigration law, and she’s also a lecturer in Morgan State’s political science department.

“The immense support that IAP gave me was immeasurable,” she says. “It was just such a phenomenal program.”

An all-around athlete in high school, Reginald Jones seriously contemplated accepting a football scholarship from Rutgers. But when he learned about IAP, he considered a different path. A graduate of a vocational high school in southwest Baltimore, where he created schematics for machinery, as well as housing and floor plans, he’d developed an interest in engineering. “I didn’t have to worry about what would happen if I got injured” at Maryland, he says.

At Maryland, Jones began as an engineering major but eventually switched to criminal justice. The support of Lee and his cohort, he says, encouraged him to make the leap when he found himself struggling in math classes. “The program teaches you resilience,” he says. “You have to readjust and make it through.”

Jones’ mentor, Thomas P. Mauriello, taught a criminalistics class that intrigued Jones. He began focusing on a career in law enforcement, interning during college with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Now, Jones is a detective in the Baltimore City Police Department and a special deputy with the U.S. Marshals Service, tracking down violent offenders in hiding.

Jones attributes his transformation from introvert to extrovert to his experience in IAP. “To be able to express yourself and drive conversation—that is the scariest thing I ever experienced,” he says. “But I did it because of the process of the program.”

Since middle school, Essence Jordan had been set on going to college. Southern High in Baltimore’s Federal Hill neighborhood didn’t have a great track record for that. “It felt prison-like,” Jordan says. “Dim lights and windows you couldn’t see out of.”

But she excelled in science and English, delivering performances at poetry slams, running track and writing for the school newspaper, and eventually graduating salutatorian.

Joining IAP was “exciting, but an adjustment,” Jordan says. “It’s the same thing as a teenager and a parent: They give you boundaries and you try to push them.” Soon, though, Jordan realized the program’s benefi ts, sharpening her public speaking skills through oratory exercises and learning how to navigate professional settings.

At UMD, a meeting with a recruiter at a career fair led to Jordan’s longtime job as a federal police officer with the Department of Defense’s Pentagon Force Protection Agency.

Now medically retired, Jordan says that her experience in IAP was critical to her professional and personal success. “Looking back, I realize everything was to help prepare us for the real world,” she says.

“Maryland was always my only choice,” says Tiana Wynn ’05. Though few of her relatives had pursued higher education, she and her aunt, who raised her, had “always talked about going to college.” During her time at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Wynn took part in programs at colleges around Baltimore, getting a taste of what higher education had to offer her.

Weekly IAP meetings “fostered stability,” says Wynn. Students learned about campus clubs and activities, went to plays in Washington, D.C., and took dining etiquette lessons, where they learned proper name tag placement and how to balance plates, silverware and glasses during cocktail parties.

Wynn was the first IAP student to study abroad, spending a semester in London. It was her first time out of the country, and she seized the opportunity to travel to Paris, Florence and Rome. “It opened this window of wanting to see the rest of the world, to see how other people live,” she says.

She snagged her first internship, at First Mariner Bank, through IAP and later interned at EY. In 2010, Wynn joined SB & Company, one of the largest minority-owned public accounting firms, where she is now a partner.

“When I go and meet people, I always say that I am a graduate of IAP,” says Wynn. “It gives me an ability to let people know the impact that it has had on me and my life.”

Ebony Washington’s childhood was characterized by instability. Her family moved around Baltimore frequently, causing her to attend four elementary schools and three high schools. As she neared graduation, the idea of college was “an escape,” she says. “I wouldn’t have to go back and forth anymore.”

Joining IAP helped Washington, who had struggled to make friends, find her people. Overnight, she felt the eight strangers in her cohort had turned into brothers and sisters.

Washington got married and became pregnant during her sophomore year of college. “Going to statistics class 8 months pregnant is not fun,” she recalls of her junior year, but she pushed through. “I remember struggling with that homework, every night coming back to my dorm room and tearing that math book apart.”

When her son was born, Washington left UMD to care for him. Eventually, she earned her associate’s degree in nursing from University of Maryland Global Campus, then a bachelor’s degree from UMGC in 2020. (She later completed a master’s degree in public health from Purdue Global.) Throughout her academic journey, “the IAP cohort was right there with me,” Washington says. “They supported me. They encouraged me and pushed me the whole way.”

Now a registered nurse with the Maryland Department of Health, focusing on high-risk maternal and child health programs, Washington says, “It’s all on the foundation of IAP. I would not have the career I have if it wasn’t for IAP.”

Raised largely in East Baltimore’s Belair-Edison neighborhood, Yavona Pirali loved her middle school’s extracurriculars: She ran track, played badminton and performed in the marching band. But “academically, it was boring,” she says. That changed when she arrived at the selective Baltimore City College, known as City, where she took honors and International Baccalaureate classes.

Pirali knew her family couldn’t afford to send her to college, so she became a regular at City’s counseling office, asking for SAT waivers and information about scholarship programs. She wanted to blaze a path different than the one her parents had. “My mom was pregnant her senior year of high school, so she didn’t get to go to prom or any of those things,” she says. “It was a big point of pride that I wasn’t pregnant.”

After being accepted into IAP, Pirali was excited about leaving her crowded house, where she lived with her parents, two siblings, two cousins and a young nephew. But UMD was a culture shock in many ways. Her freshman year roommates were obsessed with a television show Pirali had never seen: “Friends.”

The IAP cohort was a family, she says. “You had an inner group of people that you know and can depend on, talk with, venture out with.” Pirali excelled in her classes and went on to become the fi rst IAP alum to earn a graduate degree: a master’s of arts in teaching from Towson University.

Today, Pirali is back at City as assistant principal, and some of her own students have become IAP participants at UMD. “I have a legacy,” she says. “Now I know I did some things right.”