‘Craze’ aims to interest teenagers

City school alumni participate to inspire students to pursue higher education.

YOUNGSTOWN — A group of Youngstown city school alumni will bring their college preparatory program to Choffin Career & Technical Center on Friday.

College Craze, founded in 2004 by Misha Stredrick, a Rayen graduate, and Shawntae Burton, a Wilson graduate, provides high school students with a glimpse of college life and the opportunities that are available to them.

It’s become an annual program that was presented at Wilson and Rayen until those high schools were closed at the end of the last school year.

It will be offered at Choffin for the first time at 9 a.m. Friday.

The program is designed to inspire the youth of the Youngstown City School District to consider furthering their education by attending college. Its mission is to attract high school juniors and seniors to the college experience through inspiring alumni testimonials and interactive conversation. It emphasizes the importance of being knowledgeable about financial aid, academic success, enrollment retention, preparatory action and culture transitions.

Stredrick and Burton created College Craze in an effort to reach students who they feel have been marginalized by the system. As former students, the co-founders remembered what it was like to see one too many of the “average” students miss out on a chance to further their education due to lack of knowledge.

They say that many of the college-prep programs endorsed by school systems target students who require very little assistance with college preparatory information. College Craze aims to attract and encourage all students to achieve academic excellence in higher education.

The program features a panel of city school alumni who are enrolled in colleges and offer their views and suggestions to high school students interested in pursuing a college degree. College Craze uses panelist from a variety of institutions so that the students can gather as much information about as many schools as possible.

Some of the schools represented by the panelists are: Kent State University, Bowling Green State University, Mount Union College, Ohio State University, Geneva College, Youngstown State University and the University of Akron.