Photo by Erin Nelson.
Lance Beverly, with Vidal Access, talks with Sister Maria Thuan Nguyen’s AP English class about the college admissions essay at John Carroll Catholic High School on April 12.
“A kid is a kid.”
That’s the philosophy of VIDAL Access, a nonprofit college access organization that provides in-school college consulting services to primarily low-income students. Founded in July 2019 by Lance Beverly, a UAB, LSU, and Harvard graduate and Yale Educator Award recipient, VIDAL Access has already achieved considerable scale whilst helping students achieve impressive results.
For example, VIDAL recently announced that it helped two Birmingham students get accepted into Ivy League Schools. Jose Tallaj, a student at John Carroll Catholic High School, was accepted into Columbia University, and Kennedy Tyson, a student at Indian Springs School, was accepted into Brown University.
More broadly, VIDAL is presently partnered with John Carroll Catholic High School, Coosa Valley Academy, and Magic City Acceptance Academy, and it has also performed work for Birmingham City Schools and Lee High School in Montgomery, Alabama. Beyond VIDAL’s school partners, "at-large" students can also reach out for support, just as Kennedy Tyson did. Historically, VIDAL Access has also received funding support from among the state’s largest and most reputable funders, such as the MG Goodrich Foundation, Daniel Foundation, Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, EBSCO Industries, and Hugh Kaul Foundation.
What sets VIDAL Access apart is its primary service model. Indeed, the nonprofit aims to place college consultants within high schools throughout the Birmingham area to provide students with easy access to college essay support, SAT and ACT preparation, and resume building and editing assistance, among other services.
“Our method of ‘pushing into’ the schools is a reflection of our values,” said Lance Beverly, president and CEO of VIDAL Access. “We’re not trying to cherry pick the top five kids from Ramsay High School, the top three kids from Woodlawn, the top three kids from John Carroll who happen to fall into that ‘diverse bucket of students.’ We have that full-fledged model of ‘pushing into’ the schools because every kid matters.”
The U.S. Department of Education reports that students only receive 38 minutes of college counseling per year, Beverly said, which stems from the overwhelming caseloads and responsibilities of school counselors.
Specifically, Beverly noted that the American School Counseling Association recommends a 250-to-1 ratio of students to counselors, but the national average is 480-to-1 and in Alabama that number is 450 students for every single counselor.
“School counselors also have a multitude of responsibilities, such as testing coordination, conducting surveys, social and emotional development and class scheduling,” Beverly said, “which means only 22% of their time can be devoted to college counseling related tasks, according to the College Board.” He continued, “When only about a fifth of your time can be devoted to college counseling, and you have 450-ish students under your purview, it’s no wonder that the U.S. national average is 38 minutes of college counseling per year in high school.”
In light of this, VIDAL Access aims to place college consultants in schools so that low-income students can easily access college consulting support.
“Our aim is to provide low-income, lower-middle class students with the same level of college consulting support that an affluent family would seek in the private market—but we’re providing that within the school building,” Beverly said. “The fact of the matter is most of the students we serve come from a single parent household where mama’s got a couple jobs or maybe you’ve got a couple of siblings you have to look after. As such, it should not be incumbent upon them to come to us; rather, we feel it is incumbent upon us to come to them.”
Lance Beverly has had a passion for college access work since he was 16. After working in Dallas, Boston, and New York City as a college access professional, he opted to return to Alabama in 2019 to launch VIDAL—which bears the name of his late grandmother, Vida Beverly.
“It’s as simple as this: A kid’s a kid,” Beverly said. “We see a kid, we help a kid. That’s reflected in our actions by being simultaneously partnered with a devout Catholic school and LGBTQ-friendly charter school. After all, at either school and any school, a kid’s a kid—and our goal is to serve as many as possible.”
