SARANAC LAKE — North Country Community College plans to submit a request to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in the next six months as it seeks to reclassify its Revised Second Chance Pell Experiment program as a permanent prison education program.

With this reclassification, the college aims to continue to serve four area correctional facilities — Adirondack Correctional Facility, Franklin Correctional Facility, Bare Hill Correctional Facility and Federal Correctional Institute in Ray Brook — where the college currently offers courses to roughly 120 eligible inmates each year.

NCCC’s prison education program started in 2017 as part of a broader federal initiative called the Second Chance Pell Experiment, according to NCCC Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs Sarah Maroun. NCCC was one of 64 colleges across the country authorized to provide courses to inmates through this federal initiative, which first began under the Obama administration in 2015. Before the federal initiative, NCCC had provided courses to facilities in the region intermittently since the 1990s.

The federal initiative was expanded by Congress on June 20, 2023, when lawmakers approved Pell funding for incarcerated individuals to participate in higher education programs at colleges nationwide. Any college can now offer Pell grant eligible inmates the opportunity to participate in courses and earn a degree, as long as the school has an agreement with a prison.

The Congressional approval meant that the federal initiative was no longer an experiment, but a permanent program — although NCCC’s program has continued operating under an experimental status as the college awaits its upgrade to an official prison education program. The Congressional approval also required NCCC to reclassify its program as the Revised Second Chance Pell Experiment, which they did on July 1. That will be the classification under which the program is operated until 2025, when the college aims to secure permanent funding for its program through its planned request to MSCHE, NCCC’s accrediting agency.

This reclassification is necessary in order for funding to continue. Maroun said that with Congressional approval of prison education Pell funding, NCCC feels that their program is supported “across the political spectrum.”

The money received through the Pell grants is used to pay for incarcerated students’ tuition and textbooks, according to Maroun. Because the grants go directly into student tuition, the only Pell grant money NCCC receives directly from the program is for administrative expenses related to processing the incarcerated students for admission.

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“Most rewarding part”

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NCCC’s Doctor Kelli Rodriguez, who teaches psychology and sociology at all four of the prisons, said that working with incarcerated students is “truly just the most rewarding part of (her) job.”

“To walk into that environment and then have the students be so engaged and to see them — many of them — are being first generation, the only person in their family that has gone to college … and really just not thinking that they could do college,” she said. “And just seeing them just crazy excel in it — they are seriously among my best students.”

She said that it’s easy to have stereotypes about incarcerated individuals, especially through what is often portrayed in the media and movies, but she was “blown away” by the incarcerated students’ desire to learn, achieve high standards of success and apply the course material to real life.

“They often will teach me things,” she said. “I get as much from them as they get from me, being a social scientist.”

Rodriguez has been teaching at the prisons since she first got involved with NCCC in 2012, before any Pell funding was available.

This summer, she is teaching Sociology of Contemporary Problems, Developmental Psychology and Psychology of Human Relations in all four prisons.

Rodriguez said that when she explains these topics to incarcerated students, especially in the Contemporary Problems class, it leads to “amazing discussions” because a lot of the students have lived through those issues firsthand. She said classes can become intense — in a good way — because the subject matter is so real for the students.

“(They go) from kind of talking quietly or kind of under their breath, you know, not being sure that they have something to offer or a valuable position, to then being validated, to then having the words to really be able to explain life and their situation in a way that can be heard.”

Although she isn’t allowed to have much contact with incarcerated students after their release, Rodriguez said that just by seeing students’ successes in the classroom, their understanding of “the way things in society connect,” she knows that the program has had a substantial positive impact on their lives. She also supplied the statistic from social science research that recidivism is 50% less for incarcerated individuals who receive a college education through a prison education program than for those who do not.

Rodriguez also sees the positive impact of the program from witnessing the phone calls incarcerated individuals will have with their loved ones, to whom they start to become mentors themselves, via their education.

The degree programs currently offered by NCCC at the facilities are Associate of Arts Liberal Arts and Science: Humanities and Social Science, Associate of Applied Science in Entrepreneurship Management and AAS in Individual Studies, which Maroun said is open-ended, but generally has a focus on human services, an area in which a lot of incarcerated individuals end up working.

These degree programs are meant to set students up for either transfer or employment after their release.

Maroun said these degrees can help incarcerated individuals go into “whatever industry they choose.”

NCCC has about 120 incarcerated Second Chance Pell students this year, between the four prisons, according to Maroun. Last year it was closer to 100 students, but 120 is closer to the yearly average. Maroun said enrollment numbers are changing “by the day” at the moment, with fall applications coming in.