Foundation delivers Lincoln High grad to Stanford's door

Businessmen from China and Sioux Falls are video conferencing, conversing in their native tongues but understanding each other in real time though neither speaks the other's language.

How is this possible?

It isn't entirely, not yet — at least up-to-the-moment real time. But when that day comes, a 2015 Lincoln High School graduate from Sioux Falls likes to think he can play a role in conjuring that technological wizardry.

At least that's Jared Bitz's plan as he heads off to Stanford University this fall for a future he envisions in Silicon Valley as an artificial intelligence researcher.

It's a fascinating story, this tale of the seventh-grade computer geek at Patrick Henry Middle School who at age 12 meets a Virginia-based philanthropy and, with its help, is transformed six years later into Stanford's idea of the "right stuff."

Since it was founded in 2000, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation based in Lansdowne, Va., has been scouring the country looking for the lives of low-income, high-performing students still in middle school that it can impact.

National studies have found that students whose families are in the top 25 percent for income are nine times more likely to earn a college degree today than those in the lowest 25 percent. Among students who scored in the top 20 percent in achievement tests as eighth-graders, three-quarters of them in the top 20 percent for family income ended up earning college degrees. Only a third of those in the lowest 20 percent similarly got their degrees.

Bitz's family isn't destitute. But neither of his parents earned degrees beyond high school. So what they saw in the Cooke Foundation's Young Scholars initiative — made known to them by an instructor in the Sioux Falls School District's gifted student program — seemed potentially life altering.

The months-long application process with its multiple essays and necessary recommendations was rigorous. But the foundation's ultimate acceptance of Bitz meant the middle-schooler received a phenomenal amount of financial and personal support through the remainder of his K-12 journey.

The foundation was willing to pay for whatever private or charter school best fit his academic needs. It sent him off on educational excursions across the country and globe, covering all his expenses. It matched him with an advisor to help chart his academic course.

Had Bitz wanted to take violin lessons to broaden his intellectual and artistic horizons, it would have paid for that, too.

"We're trying to give them an opportunity to make the most of their high school years and level the playing field for them compared to their more affluent peers," said Dana O'Neill, director of the foundation's higher education program.

It's not the only such benefactor out there. Chicago-based Northwestern University's Midwest Academic Talent Search program has been to Sioux Falls, assessing academic ability and, if deemed appropriate, connecting advanced students to resources and opportunities.

And financial investments? There are scores of scholarship opportunities that get trumpeted yearly. A Burger King foundation just announced Peyton DeJong of Philip as one of three national recipients to receive a $50,000 scholarship to take with her when she attends South Dakota State University this fall. Other retailers have foundational programs as well. Kohl's, for example, just granted Marissa Kunerth of Brewster, Minn., a $1,000 scholarship.

But the Cooke Foundation's largesse? "This is the only one I know of where students are identified in middle school and are mentored through high school," said Sharon Andrews, who teaches in Edison Middle School's honors program but was the gifted education instructor at Patrick Henry when Bitz was there.

Audrey Mullen with the foundation named after Canadian enterpreneur Jack Kent Cooke, who once owned the Washington Redskins and Los Angeles Lakers, echoed that.

"There are many that focus on working with high-achieving, low-income students to get them into independent high schools," Mullen said. "But they don't provide the money that we provide for academic enrichment and extracurricular exploration."

So what has all this meant for Jared Bitz? The foundation brought him to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore at the end of eighth-grade year to learn about the Cooke programs. In the summer after ninth grade, he traveled to San Francisco for a community service project, and later that same summer studied robotics at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla.

He spent a month at England's Oxford University in 2013 for Latin and literature studies. There was the trip to Brown University in Rhode Island to learn about optics and psychology after his junior year.

And this summer he's spending time at Black Hills State University in Spearfish looking into physics at the nearby Sanford Underground Research lab before embarking on a journey to Chicago and then Rome to learn more about the world of particle accelerators.

"By far the greatest gift the foundation has given me has been the opportunities to attend summer programs that would have been far beyond my financial reach," Bitz, 18, said. "It's all changed me a lot as a person. ... I know there are thousands upon thousands of students out there whose capacity to grow and achieve has been stolen away by such fundamentally unfair circumstances."

A kid with a lot of intellectual firepower but only modest financial means would have gone somewhere to college. Bitz is certain of that. It might have been a public institution here in South Dakota. It could have meant taking on a lot of personal debt.

He would have done that.

But in fact the Cooke Foundation with its travel opportunities and its education advisor guiding him along the way delivered him, he is convinced, to Stanford's doorstep.

It will cost $60,000 a year to attend this prestigious school. Scholarships and grants he's been awarded will pay all but $5,000 of it, Bitz said. The remainder is being covered by the Cooke Foundation.

"The foundation ... made me into the person that Stanford wanted," he said. "I don't know that I would have been quite the material they would have been looking for if not for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation."

So he's headed to California to unlock the math behind the mind and apply it to the amazing computational and processing capabilities of computers. Maybe he'll teach them how to speak in tongues in real time. Perhaps he'll broaden Siri's ability to have interactive conversations on the Apple iPhone. Or he could become the guy who turns robots into doctors who can make preliminary diagnoses of illnesses.

Her organization hopes all that comes true, said O'Neill, the higher education program director for the Cooke Foundation.

But more than that, she simply hopes that more South Dakota students will look at the opportunities this foundation offers. Since its founding, it has identified eight young scholars in this state. Most of those were from the reservations, including Emily Janis of Kyle, who plans to study drama and theater arts at South Dakota State.

"I think there are definitely more students in South Dakota who would qualify for this," O'Neill said. "We don't have limits on the numbers we take from certain states, and we can do better in getting more applicants there. For South Dakota at least, that's our goal."

To learn more

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is dedicated to advancing the education of exceptionally promising students who have financial need. It offers scholarships, comprehensive counseling and other support services to students from seventh grade to graduate school. Founded in 2000, the foundation has awarded $130 million in scholarships to 1,900 students and over $80 million in grants. For more information, go to www.jkcf.org