Forget E.F. Hutton. When Amanda Sterk, Ed.D., utters the magic words all parents and guardians desire, they listen: “If you know this, you can get your kids where they need to be.”
As director of Accelerated Pathways at Florida SouthWestern State College, Amanda straddles two worlds: its collegiate high school and public dual enrollment programs.
Logan Newell
Amanda Sterk poses on the Florida SouthWestern State College campus.
It didn’t take long in her current position to realize that parents were asking the same questions. What’s the best college-prep path: Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education? Dual enrollment? How can their child choose a career they will love? How do I maneuver School Choice? What are the best college application essay topics? What’s the quickest or least expensive way to complete a degree? What if my child doesn’t have the interest or aptitude for college?
A former high school counselor, Amanda understood the dizzying whirl of questions and had written her dissertation on career readiness. At FSW, Amanda manages the early admission students from the five-county area who are taking a full college load in 11th and 12th grades as part of FSW Collegiate High School. She also oversees the dual enrollment program for part-time public high school students. This position gives her a good understanding of the public, private and charter schools in the region and perspective on career readiness for home-schooled students, too. “I see how it all fits together,” she says.
“Parents were asking the same questions again and again. I realized that 90 percent of what I was doing was having the same, generalized conversation. I wondered what I could give to the 90 percent of parents so I could focus on the 10 percent, to give individualized advice to each student,” Amanda, 39, says. In addition, she sometimes struggled to find the answers parents were seeking. “We have so many options; however, there hasn’t been a great job of explaining all the different options. There’s a lot of misconceptions. I was having difficulty finding quality information.”
Local school counselors are overwhelmed, she notes, with counselor-to-student ratios of 1-to-500 or higher. Counselors are frequently pulled away to meet with parents and faculty, address mental health crises and administer tests.
Logan Newell
Amanda Sterk poses on the Florida SouthWestern State College campus.
“They are so busy,” Amanda says. “A lot of times, college and career readiness are pushed to the back burner. Schools just can’t do it all.”
Then she realized: Why not create a step-by-step guidebook to lay it all out for frazzled high schoolers, counselors and parents? She created “College UnMazed: Your Guide Through the Florida College and University System,” which some school groups have sold as fundraisers. She also started the UnMazed blog and magazine to expand on topics such as mental health, volunteering, physical fitness for teens and interpersonal relationships. The magazine is broken into themes that align with the academic calendar, such as back-to-school, college applications and scholarships and summertime work experience. It is not printed in hard copy, but the digital edition goes to 17,000 readers/subscribers, including 4,000 counselors and administrators. She has 40 contributors in a range of fields, and says schools and educators are welcome to share the materials.
The blog and website, UnMaze.Me, also offers a resource directory listing financial advisors, counselors, parenting support and other professionals and pertinent businesses. In totality, UnMazed “becomes a one-stop shop for getting kids through adolescence,” Amanda says.
Amanda is clearly entrenched in higher education, though she is not completely biased.
“I’m really about career readiness,” she says, and that can include several different tracks, including graduating with one of the many industry and professional certifications offered at public high schools and technical colleges. “The goal is to get our students to be directly employable with a good career.”
Amanda came to Southwest Florida with her family: husband, Heath, a middle-school science teacher, and their two daughters, Eden, 12, and Rilah, 9. It was a circuitous route from their home states in the Midwest to working at international schools in Germany, Japan, Niger, West Africa and Nicaragua on multiyear assignments. They returned from West Africa to Iowa when Amanda was pregnant with Eden. She finished her master’s degree specializing in high school counseling, “which had always been my dream” while teaching and counseling and having their second daughter.
The whole family packed up and moved to Nicaragua for a three-year stint where Amanda was a high school counselor. While pursuing her doctorate, Amanda realized her options for career ascension in the international schools were limited to administrative positions, but that wasn’t her passion.
“I really liked college programming, getting students into college,” she says, “so I wanted to make the leap professionally.”
In 2015, she applied for an opening as a high school counselor for FSW Collegiate High School on the Lee County campus, assisting her senior class with netting $10 million in scholarships at top post-secondary institutions.
Her passion for getting budding adults where they need to be for the next phase of their lives extends beyond the campus. She serves on a college readiness committee for the Southwest Florida Community Foundation’s FutureMakers Coalition, which has a goal of increasing the region’s percent of college graduates and residents with advanced certifications and credentials to 40 percent by 2025. Half of the proceeds from UnMaze magazine advertising are donated to FutureMakers, “so I’m helping to build college programs in Southwest Florida.”