Maria Grosskettler 
Maria Grosskettler’s 2022 feature describes how Montana’s GEAR UP program, as explained by Dr. Travis Anderson, worked to prepare students in remote and tribal communities for college. The section added below explains what the GEAR UP program is and what Montana’s current grant, awarded in 2024, looks like.
Where the Rocky Mountains slope to meet the Great Plains and the distance between towns stretches for hundreds of miles across America’s raw and native landscape is where Dr. Travis Anderson is shrinking that vastness with virtual instruction in an effort to gear up the motivation for higher education.
Twenty years ago, Dr. Anderson entered a middle school science classroom ready to engage, motivate, and inspire students to become lifelong learners. After five years of classroom teaching, he moved into school administrative positions while furthering his own education with earning a doctorate, all the while never losing sight of his core philosophy of education.
Now, he is utilizing his passion and expertise to draw awareness and provide support to the vast open skies that await students across Montana’s higher education landscape.
Shifting Gears to America’s Big Sky State
When Dr. Anderson’s wife accepted a position in Helena, Montana, he shifted positions from K-12 education and moved to Montana University System’s GEAR UP program. Standing for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, GEAR UP remains true to Dr. Anderson’s mission twenty years ago as a classroom teacher; helping others achieve academic success.
He is one of the few people at GEAR UP with the K-12 perspective as opposed to higher education, which brings a unique eye to the program. “My knowledge of educational practices, both as a classroom teacher and as a school and district level administrator, as well as having knowledge of school finance and state or federal guidelines, has been a big advantage in coming into this position at a state agency,” shared Dr. Anderson.
The core mission of GEAR UP is to help students from high-poverty, underserved communities in Montana access post-secondary education, from trade schools to certificate programs, to earning a 2-year or 4-year degree. This mission is multi-tiered and begins with students in 7th grade all the way through their first year of post-secondary schooling, ensuring that students are aware and prepared for all that the state of Montana can provide to help them achieve their career goals. These services include academic preparedness such as additional tutoring support to ensure high school graduation, post-secondary planning and career pathways, financial aid knowledge, and orientation to college and support during students’ first year on a campus or in a program.
To achieve this, Montana GEAR UP partners with 18 schools across 16 districts in the Big Sky State, creating a total of over 5,500 students that they serve. Of those 18 schools, 14 of them are either on or near an American Indian Reservation. Therefore, 70% of the students GEAR UP supports identify as American Indian.
In addition to that, they have campus partnerships on five Montana campuses. One of those being a tribal college campus where GEAR UP sponsors first-year services for those students on campus. Dr. Anderson explained, “This includes everything from access to tutoring to a more robust orientation to help from understanding the parking plans and meal plans. We provide support with housing applications and how to access student health services. We cover all of those things that happen on campus that a lot of kids aren’t used to.”
Higher education often seems so out of reach for many of Montana’s first-generation prospects, but with people like Dr. Anderson and his colleagues at Montana GEAR UP, it really is accessible and attainable no matter your background… as long as the motivation exists.
“The thing that worries me? That we may lose a generation.”
Dr. Anderson is proud to be a first-generation college graduate himself, and he strives to open the doors for others to feel success in their post-secondary schooling, but it’s proving to be a challenge with this current generation of students.
“What keeps me up at night is that we have this low engagement coming out of this pandemic,” shared Dr. Anderson. “And I worry that we are going to lose an entire generation of students because of the ripple effects of all this chaotic change that has been part of our lives for the last two-plus years.”
He explained, “One of the things that Montana GEAR UP provides are summer programs on different campuses. We get students on campus to explore various programs and aspects of campus life. In the years before the pandemic, we had really high levels of student engagement and support. But this year, it was down across the board. We had about half the student participation in 2021 than we normally saw in previous years.”
This current low engagement could certainly affect students in middle and high school in that they may not choose to pursue post-secondary schooling.
“We’re doing everything we can at GEAR UP so that we can help – in any way that we can,” said Dr. Anderson. “The clock is ticking on how you make up this time lost from the pandemic.”
Time and Place – The Need to Connect Students to Teachers in the Here and Now
Time is a crucial component to GEAR UP’s mission of supporting students in their post-secondary education so as to not lose this generation.
But so is the place.
“Montana is an incredibly remote state, so a lot of our communities have hundreds of miles between them and the next town, and the one thing that some of our schools were telling us is that they had issues finding after-school tutoring to support their students,” explained Dr. Anderson. “Some communities may have the money and funds for after-school tutoring and academic support, but if they are unable to find qualified teachers, then what’s the point?”
Qualified teachers are certainly key, and Dr. Anderson said, “GEAR UP started looking at what we can do from managing a larger contract at the state level, and that’s when we found iTutor.”
iTutor provides virtual instruction to students on Mountain Time, which is crucial to scheduling and ensuring equitable access. The instruction is provided by certified educators who are trained and proficient in first building rapport with students, which every teacher knows is a key factor in actually teaching them anything.
Dr. Anderson shared, “We had one student in Libby, Montana, a town in the very northwest corner of the state, who was doing math tutoring with iTutor, and actually submitted a request to their principal to see if they could hire the tutor because the student liked that tutor so much and the tutor did such a nice job of explaining math in a way that the student could understand it.”
One community that bordered a reservation was so impressed with the iTutor services provided to the indigenous population that when a Spanish-speaking student moved in, they found additional resources to set up an iTutor plan solely for that particular student.
Technology consumes our lives, and now through programs like iTutor, education can be consumed through its engaging power. This level of engagement is key to motivating this generation of students and instilling in them a lifelong love of learning, and thankfully there are people like Dr. Anderson and his colleagues at Montana GEAR UP who will continue to serve as the support and encouragement for those students to achieve their dreams.
The GEAR UP program: what it is and where Montana’s program stands now
The GEAR UP program, short for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, is the federal grant program that the article above describes in Montana. The Utah State University page on its own grants calls it a federally funded national grant program that aims to increase the number of low-income students prepared for postsecondary education and success there. The same page says Utah State’s new grants carry federal funding for the next seven years, that the program follows students from seventh grade through their freshman year of college, and that the competition for GEAR UP grants is high. This section updates the article with what Montana has reported about its grant since 2022.
Montana’s 2024 grant
The Montana University System’s GEAR UP page states that the U.S. Department of Education awarded the Montana Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education a seven-year grant of $29,750,000 in 2024, with yearly funding of $4.25 million. Of that, $684,000 a year is set aside for 21st Century Scholars scholarships for eligible students. The page says the grant serves students in grades 7 through 12 in 12 school districts, with 4,400 students served by the end of the grant cycle, 2,600 of them American Indian. Montana’s program overview words the partnership differently, as 12 middle and receiving high schools, and adds that eight of them are on or near the state’s seven American Indian reservations, and that Montana also held GEAR UP grants in 1999, 2005, 2011 and 2017.
Those numbers differ from the ones in Grosskettler’s feature, which reported 18 schools across 16 districts, more than 5,500 students and 70 percent of them American Indian. Because the 2024 grant is a new award, the figures in the article describe the program under the earlier grant. Of the 4,400 students in the new cycle, 2,600 is about 59 percent, so the share of American Indian students remains a majority. Anyone citing Montana GEAR UP figures should say which grant period they come from.
The services the program lists
Montana lists comprehensive advising and tutoring, dual enrollment access, college application help, guidance on financial aid and scholarships, college visits, mentoring, professional development for school staff, and transition and retention services for GEAR UP students who enter college. The overview also names summer programming and supplemental curriculum, and state-level work such as the Montana College Application Week campaign. These match the categories Dr. Travis Anderson described in the article: academic preparation, post-secondary planning, financial aid knowledge and first-year support.
Two features stand out for readers in other states. The program begins in seventh grade and continues through the first year of college, so one grant follows the same cohort from middle school to high school to campus, and the Utah State page says that site coordinators there stay with an entire cohort across those grades. Montana also attaches a scholarship component, the 21st Century Scholars funding named above, so the support addresses cost as well as preparation.
What a family or school can do
The sources reviewed do not describe eligibility rules, so a family should ask the school counselor whether the school is a GEAR UP school and which services students can use. For schools outside Montana, the first step is to find out whether a state or partnership grant already serves the district. USU’s page notes that Utah’s programs combine mentoring, after-school and summer activities, tutoring, college visits and financial aid nights, a list that gives counselors a useful checklist when they compare programs.
The article above also raised a concern that still deserves attention. In 2022 Anderson reported that summer campus program participation in 2021 was about half of what it had been before the pandemic, and called access to qualified after-school tutoring a persistent difficulty in remote communities. The sources reviewed for this update give no later participation figures, and they do not evaluate virtual tutoring, so the current effect of either point on Montana students is not known from them. Tutoring remains on the current list of services.
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