Spelman College Offers Access to College-Level Courses to Over 500 Underserved High School Students Through Partnership with NEON
Spelman Faculty and Teaching Fellows to Guide Additional 600 Students in College-Level Learning in 2025-2026
ATLANTA, Nov. 11, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Spelman College is proud to announce the expansion of its partnership with the newly renamed National Education Opportunity Network (NEON), formerly the National Education Equity Lab. Since Spelman joined the network in Spring 2023, the program has rapidly grown from one class and 50 students to two classes and nearly 300 students in 2025.
Spelman has helped educate 542 NEON scholars from 33 high schools across 15 cities over the past two years. Twelve of the NEON scholars later enrolled at Spelman after graduating high school. The College is on track to enroll an additional 600 scholars in the program for the 2025-2026 academic year.
“The growth has been outstanding. To be able to offer a college-level course to high school students in underserved communities has been transformational,” said Andrea Lewis, Ph.D., director of the Student Success Program and an associate professor of education at Spelman. “Spelman has always been community-oriented, but this has taken our mission to the next level. It speaks directly to high school students’ continued interest in HBCUs and recent national trends in increasing admission rates at HBCUs.”
The partnership launched with a course titled ‘The Education of Black Girls,’ taught by Dr. Lewis. This fall, Spelman introduced a second NEON course titled ‘African Diaspora and the World,’ taught by Chatee’ Omísade Richardson, Ph.D., assistant professor and coordinator of field and clinical experience in education at Spelman.
As part of the partnership, 14 Spelman students serve as teaching fellows in the program, engaging with the high school students by sharing their knowledge and skills with the scholars. According to a recent survey shared by NEON, 100% of the Spelman fellows from Spring 2025 said serving as a teaching fellow was “one of the most valuable experiences they had in college that year.”
“With 60% of NEON scholars identifying as female and 93% of students self-reporting as students of color, we are honored to not only bring rigorous courses but also ones that have proven to be deeply impactful for our scholars,” said Laura Moore, chief higher education officer with NEON. “The education of Black girls extends beyond the classroom in ways course offerings may not. We’ve had co-teachers, students and teaching fellows express the intergenerational impact it has had on them to be able to discuss topics of race, gender and class and how it has changed and not changed over time.”
Click here to learn more about the NEON program at Spelman.
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About Spelman College
Founded in 1881, Spelman College is a leading liberal arts college widely recognized as the global leader in the education of women of African descent. Located in Atlanta, the College’s picturesque campus is home to 2,300 students. Spelman is the country's leading producer of Black women who complete Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The College’s status is confirmed by the U.S. News & World Report, which ranked Spelman No. 39 among all liberal arts colleges, No. 19 for undergraduate teaching, No. 2 for social mobility among liberal arts colleges, and No. 1 for the 17th year among historically Black colleges and universities. Recent initiatives include a designation by the Department of Defense as a Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM, a Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute, the first endowed queer studies chair at an HBCU and a program to increase the number of Black women Ph.D.s in economics. New majors and minors have been added, including documentary filmmaking and photography, data science, refugee studies and gaming. Collaborations have been also established with MIT’s Media Lab, the Broad Institute and the Army Research Lab for artificial intelligence and machine learning, among others.
Outstanding alumnae include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former Walgreens Boots Alliance CEO Rosalind Brewer, political leader Stacey Abrams, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook, former Acting Surgeon General and Spelman’s first alumna president Audrey Forbes Manley, Harvard University professor and former Dean Evelynn Hammonds, actress and producer Latanya Richardson Jackson, global bioinformatics geneticist Janina Jeff and authors Pearl Cleage and Tayari Jones.
To learn more, please visit spelman.edu and @spelmancollege on social media.
Brijea Daniel Spelman College brijeadaniel@spelman.edu
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