On Sept. 8, 2025, Wofford welcomed a group of local elementary school students for a visit to the campus. These 110 students are fifth graders from the nearby elementary schools, Mary H. Wright and Cleveland Academy of Leadership.
These schools are longtime partners of Associate Professor of Anthropology and Community Sustainability Specialist, Dr. Alysa Handelsman’s year-long Community Sustainability seminar. Through this initiative, Wofford students work closely with a number of community-based programs in Spartanburg. One of these are the Kings and Queens Clubs, which works with elementary students on a number of character-driven skills like confidence and voice.
This year, the curriculum of these clubs is centered around a series of books on the power of voice by Dr. Katrina Hutchins. Hutchins led a workshop for these elementary schoolers at Wofford which was preceded by a campus tour.
“I think it’s always great to bring students to Wofford,” Handelsman said. “For some students it’s their first time being on a college campus. We bring groups of students here several times a year, but this was the first time we had this big event attached to it as well.”
Jack Wisham, the visit and application specialist in Wofford’s Admissions department, shared that Handelsman’s initiative is not the first time that elementary schoolers have formally visited Wofford. In fact, Dr. David Pittman of the psychology department has organized visits for local students of a similar age group who are a part of their school’s gifted and talented programs.
So how is a college tour truly impactful for such young students? Well, according to both Handelsman and Wisham, there are several unexpected benefits for the students on these visits.
“(These tours) promote knowledge,” Wisham said. “You have younger students who are seeing this as the place they could potentially be and it’s giving them a very tangible and realistic goal for them to achieve.”
Wisham expressed that these tours geared towards younger demographics tend to differ from the typical admissions visit. For example, elementary students do not visit any dorms and tour guides are instructed to focus on more concrete concepts like the layout of campus.
For the Kings and Queens Clubs, these visits do more than promote the college lifestyle, they work in tandem with the clubs’ goals of personal growth and building mentorship connections.
“We are doing a career readiness program also with fifth graders at Mary H. Wright and in all the meetings I’m in, there is just so much emphasis on the importance of connection and connecting to post-secondary education pathways down the line,” Handelsman said.
By hosting these tours and collaborating with the Community Sustainability seminar, Wofford is playing a significant role in shaping young students’ goals and concepts of post-secondary education. While the goal of these visits is not to suggest that college is the only path, it does offer an introduction to what college could look like in a way that younger students can understand.
Early college visits also go hand-in-hand with the concept of career-readiness that the Kings and Queens Clubs are trying to foster. Handelsman mentioned how during recent discussions in her field, the impact of early exposure to career options and what they require is often emphasized. Early college visits can help to facilitate these conversations with young students.
Follow this link for more information about the Community Sustainability seminar at Wofford:
