Operating out of three Catholic middle schools, Access Academies offers enrichment, counseling, and scholarships to hundreds of disadvantaged kids.

The nonprofit Access Academies provides hundreds of St. Louis-area students with after-school activities, high school counseling and financial assistance. (Access Academies)
Originally published on The 74
The jump from eighth grade to high school is one of the hardest transitions in childhood. Joseph Olascoaga had to make it while living thousands of miles from his parents.
His mother and father, who immigrated illegally to St. Louis before he was born, returned to Mexico when he was still in middle school. It was a necessary step — back in their hometown, Joseph’s grandmother was homebound and badly in need of care — but it left him alone with the choice of where to enroll after he graduated from Saint Cecilia School and Academy, the Hispanic-majority Catholic school he’d attended since his elementary years.

Access Academies student Joseph Olascoaga, center, with his older brothers and sisters. (Access Academies)
He moved in with his older sister and brother-in-law, who were happy to drive him to school interviews and open houses. Yet he was still faced with the complexity of the city’s sprawling Catholic education sector, which serves thousands of families as an alternative to the chronically struggling St. Louis public school district.
Each choice bore a heady price tag and an unfamiliar name: Christian Brothers College High School, Chaminade College Preparatory School, St. John Vianney High School. “I had no idea what high school to go to,” Joseph remembered. “I didn’t even know all these schools existed.”
Fortunately, he’d been dealt a trump card before the process even began. Beginning in sixth grade, Joseph participated in Access Academies, a nonprofit initiative that provides hundreds of St. Louis-area students with after-school activities, high school and postsecondary counseling and financial assistance. Embedded in three Catholic middle schools, including St. Cecilia’s, Access Academies staffers help families send their children to the schools they want and make sure they stay on track to succeed after graduation. In total, the program has awarded $9 million in scholarships since its founding in 2005.
Perhaps more importantly, it offers a model of intensive support that bolsters local institutions while helping profoundly disadvantaged children transition to adulthood. Across St. Louis, 37 percent of children live below the poverty line — more than double the national average — while fewer than one-quarter of all K–12 students can read or do math at grade level. In a city that has been fiercely criticized for not helping young people to thrive, the aid provided by Access Academies allows families to choose their next steps without having to decamp for the suburbs.

Participating students — about 500 currently, distributed among middle schools, high schools, and universities — receive benefits ranging from tutoring to summer academies to care packages in their college dorms. And to a large extent, they’ve been successful, with 97 percent of Access Academies students graduating high school on time;93 percent are accepted to a post-secondary institution.
Above all, said Shelly Williams, Access Academies’ executive director, they get the chance to see the possibilities that await them outside their neighborhoods and nearby schools.
“A lot of our kids simply don’t have that opportunity, whether they’re in charter or public schools,” Williams said. Whether or not a student happens to live in one of St. Louis’s prosperous neighborhoods is “sort of the indicator of whether you have access to opportunity,” she added.
Joseph is now a freshman at Saint Louis University, deciding between majoring in business or engineering. Five years after his largely self-directed high school search, he said the organization laid a path to his success in college and beyond.
“Access was feeding me information, like: ‘This high school is good, this high school is also good. What’s the difference between both of them?’ And it wasn’t ever a financial problem because they could help me.”
Staying ‘10 steps ahead’
Many St. Louis parents are just as daunted by the high school and college application processes as Joseph was in eighth grade.
The local K–12 menu is overstuffed with options, including traditional neighborhood schools, charters and a few highly regarded magnet programs. To make things even more complicated, St. Louis is home to one of the largest Catholic school sectors in the country — the city was founded by French settlers and named after a Catholic saint — and for over a century, the Archdiocese of St. Louis has enrolled tens of thousands of pupils in both the city and surrounding St. Louis County.RelatedSt. Louis Schools Face One of the Steepest Post-Pandemic Climbs Anywhere
Families historically opted for private or parochial schools out of necessity as well as religious devotion. St. Louis Public Schools has long been one of the most troubled school systems in the country, routinely posting dreadful standardized test scores even before the learning catastrophe of COVID-19. In just over 50 years, the district lost 85 percent of its students, and the vast majority of those left are poor.

But the cost of going private can be prohibitive. Annual tuition at the highly regarded (and secular) John Burroughs School, which produced Mad Men star Jon Hamm and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, approaches $35,000. The comparatively cheap Nerinx Hall, a Catholic girls school in suburban Webster Groves, still costs over $18,000 to attend this year.
Access Academies offers substantial financial aid to participating families, paying nearly $750,000 in high school scholarships and secondary costs (application, uniform, and technology fees can also be steep) last year. The organization also works directly with high schools to negotiate discounts for families that still struggle with the bill.
But Williams said that logistical help can be no less crucial, especially as students begin to survey their prospects after high school. The procedural obstacles woven into the college search, including arranging campus visits and wrangling tax documents to complete financial aid forms, prevent thousands of potential freshmen from enrolling in college every year. RelatedFall College Data Shows Big Gains — And Jarring Freshmen Declines
“It’s layers and layers of things, and there needs to be someone here to help them navigate those layers and stay on top of the laws, which are constantly changing,” Williams said, noting that the federal financial aid form has undergone significant changes this year. “We have to stay 10 steps ahead of all the systems, try to prepare our families in the meantime and be emotionally supportive too.”
Both raw application numbers and public opinion polling show that interest in college has declined somewhat since the pandemic, but in Missouri, the trend seems to go back a decade or more. According to a 2022 brief from Saint Louis University’s Policy Research in Missouri Education Center, the rate of Missourians immediately enrolling in either a two- or four-year college after graduating high school fell from 69 percent in 2011 to 62 percent in 2019. When then-Gov. Eric Greitens eliminated state funding for high school juniors to sit for the ACT, the rate of students taking that exam fell by 15 percentage points.

Access Academies requires its students to take the ACT and provides a free preparatory course on Saturday mornings. It also hosts bilingual seminars on how to fill out financial aid forms (dubbed “FAFSA Frenzies”) and pushes students to identify schools or vocational programs that interest them in their early high school years.
The strategy is specifically tailored for the kids served by Access. Carolyn Dubuque, the organization’s director of mission effectiveness, said that many of the private schools in the area expect students to take the initiative in contacting their college offices. But students like Joseph, who was a starting forward on his high school soccer team, helped look after five nieces and nephews, and worked a construction job in his senior year, may not be prepared to do that.
“You can’t spit in St. Louis and not hit a Catholic high school,” Dubuque observed. “But these Catholic high schools are not designed for our kids — underserved, first-generation students.”
Each Access Academies middle school (St. Cecilia’s and St. Louis Catholic Academy in St. Louis proper, as well as Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School in East St. Louis, Illinois) is staffed with graduate support directors who follow all of the program’s students throughout their time in high school. If the students wish to, they may continue to receive services — including counseling and “micro-scholarships” tied to GPA and career benchmarks — while enrolled in college.
Amy Clark, Access’s director of college and career initiatives, said that her job often involved cajoling high schoolers and their parents to keep working through a nasty labyrinth of paperwork and email portals.
“A lot of the help isn’t us making magic happen,” Clark said. “It’s: ‘Open up your email with me, and let’s go through this. Don’t be overwhelmed with this form, let’s just get it submitted.’”
‘Engaging with an existing community’
Admissions essays and summer internships seem like distant concepts at Sister Thea Bowman Catholic School.
In part, that’s because of its setting. East St. Louis, which looks out at the hopeful curve of the Gateway Arch from just across the Mississippi River, is one of America’s poorest and most crime-plagued communities. The most recent state accountability report issued by Illinois shows that just 13 percent of the local school district’s students scored proficient in reading in 2023, while less than 6 percent scored proficient in math.
Situated on a quiet stretch of the aptly named Church Lane, the school exudes a placid feel. On a Thursday afternoon just before Thanksgiving, the walls were bedecked with pictures of prominent Catholics, including that of Sister Thea herself, a charismatic nun who evangelized to African Americans through music and dance. The building recently finished a multi-year effort to install soundproof windows that, according to the school’s advancement director, could withstand a chunk of asphalt being dropped on them — which is exactly what happened nearly 10 years ago to the ones they replaced.
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