Muchin College Prep DREAMers' Club

With these funds I will...grant a dream to a DREAMer!

The fight for immigration reform becomes louder and louder.  Bibiana Romero, a current senior at Muchin College Prep, has founded a DREAMers' Club - a safe space for other students like her, undocumented immigrants, to bring the fight to Chicago.  While most students can earn a 3.0 GPA and a 22 ACT score in order to earn an adequate combination of federal loans, grants, and scholarships, DREAMers cannot.  In order for DREAMers to fund their college education, they have to earn much higher metrics in high school in hopes of earning a partial- or full-ride to college as they are not granted any federal loans whatsoever.  Ultimately, DREAMers have to work twice as hard against infinitely more obstacles than their peers to earn a college degree, and thus, a brighter future.  It is simply not fair that our undocumented students, who were brought to the United States for a better life (often unknowingly as they were so young when they made the trip) are not allowed the same opportunity as their peers. This is especially true considering that many of them live in single-parent homes and are scraping to make it through the next day as wages for their undocumented parent(s) are incredibly low.

Muchin College Prep is just that - a charter school within Chicago Public Schools that pushes its students with rigorous curricula in attempt to eliminate the achievement gap and provide the city's under-served students equal access to a college education.  Bibiana, currently a 4.0 student, has been accepted into 8 colleges.   How cruel is it, that after these four years of grueling college preparation, college is not an option for her due to financial reasons.  Her only reasonable option at this point is community college, which is disheartening given how high her GPA is.    

The money raised will help our DREAMers make college affordable in the following ways:

1) Funding DACA applications ($465 every two years). DACA grants undocumented immigrants a temporary social security number which allows them to work and remain in the United States legally as long as the individual has no criminal record.  Being DACA-eligible also allows seniors in high school to apply to significantly more scholarships for college compared to those students who are not DACA-eligible. 

2) Funding the college gap through a Muchin DREAMers' Scholarship.  Because undocumented students do not qualify for financial aid, college often seems impossible.  While the common senior applying to college can get loans to cover the ~$12,000 gap per year to go to college, the undocumented student has to a) find a college that has a much smaller gap (usually a school of lower quality such as a community college), and b) find the cash to cover the gap as he/she is not eligible for federal financial aid.

Thank you so much for your help - every dollar spent is a dollar investing in our future generations by funding a DREAMer's college education!

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