Since the Pandemic of COVID-19, the Promise Corps administrative team has been working with the College and Career Coaches (CCC’s) on finding ways to engage students both academically and mentally. We want our students to know that despite us physically not being in school, it does not mean that our support of them stops. That being said, Promise Corps has begun to prepare and execute a ramped up social media plan to increase our interaction with our students.  Teens nowadays go to social media for everything, which is why our focus is reaching them through our Instagram, Twitter, and our Blog. With this social media push the goal is to engage our students as much as possible and to remind them that the Promise Corps team is still here. We also hope that including ourselves on social media will just cheer up our students overall seeing a friendly face. 

Coaches were given a plethora of different types of posts to start drafting in order to generate as much content as possible hitting a wide variety of topics. One of these topics include: wellness, post-secondary, resources, inspirational quotes, and recruitment material for future coaches! Us coaches spent days and days searching the internet and reaching out to our networks to help get the best material possible to share with our students through these social media posts. 

Our hope with these posts is that we can stay engaged and continue to further our students academically and with their post-secondary planning. One great example of resources we hope to connect our students with via social media is college and SAT resources. Due to COVID-19 many of our Promise Corps campus visits were forced to be cancelled. Just because we can’t physically be on campus, many colleges are offering virtual campus tours for free! Those types of resources are things students might not as readily find and we hope to make that search easier for them.

Another great example of post-secondary resources we hope to share via social media is webinars and online lectures! Many universities and organizations are offering online conferences and workshops to students. These are great ways for students to get some great information on topics that directly relate to their post-secondary plans. For example, there is an upcoming virtual STEM event coming out that we hope to get students who are particularly interested in STEM to attend. These types of resources are so great and free and we want to make sure our students are as connected to these opportunities as possible.

Another great social media strategy we hope to put into place is hosting a Promise Corps Virtual Spirit Week. With everything going on in the world, Promise Corps figured virtually lifting everyone’s spirits would be a great idea! The idea of virtual spirit week would be to have a theme every day and have our members engage and post themselves participating and therefore hopefully inspire our students to share in the spirit! 

We are also planning on posting self-care and mental wellness posts. During such a difficult time, some people struggle to remember they need to take care of themselves before focusing on others or daily tasks. That being said, posting self-care tips, examples, resources and other wellness material that is so important for our students. 

While physical school is on halt, life still goes on. Seniors are still graduating and moving on to their post-secondary plan, 11th graders will still have to take the SAT, and 10th graders are still trying to push through to the next grade level. Our goal is to make sure our students can still achieve these goals and have the support necessary to do so.

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Abbey Piro- College and Career Coach at School of the Future