St. Bernard's program helps college-bound

By Tanya Connor
The Catholic Free Press

FITCHBURG – The advice of a friend saved a family $100,000 on college costs and was the impetus for creating a program that could do the same for others.
Brian Gardiner, the father of St. Bernard’s High School students, was moved to help families get free college financial aid services from his friend’s company, Campus Bound.
Normally, individual families pay Campus Bound, a Needham-based college admissions and financial aid services business, for help with their college planning. But by setting in motion a program to find donors to pay for Campus Bound’s work, Mr. Gardiner has ensured that families in participating schools can get the services for free. The current base cost is $5,000 per school.
Campus Bound staff are experts in the field of college financial aid, so they augment the work of the high school counselors, Mr. Gardiner said.
So far, more than 500 families in seven schools have benefited from the program that started at St. Bernard’s three years ago, he said.
Mr. Gardiner and his wife, Cristina Valeri, sent their three children to the Catholic schools she attended – St. Anna Elementary in Leominster and St. Bernard’s High. In 2020, when their oldest, David, was about to graduate, they assumed they had to take out expensive college loans.
Then Mr. Gardiner asked for advice from a friend, Gregg L. Cohen, president of Campus Bound. Mr. Cohen told him that he’d made costly mistakes on a financial aid form. He also explained that applicants can appeal to colleges for more merit aid than the colleges initially grant to students they are trying to attract. After taking Mr. Cohen’s advice, the Gardiners were offered additional money from all the schools David had applied to – and they received an additional $100,000 in aid from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where David is now a junior.
“My wife and I are involved helping at St. Bernard’s in all sorts of ways,” Mr. Gardiner said. “I said to Gregg, ‘You need to help more families with what you know. … Let’s start with St. Bernard’s.’”
Student debt is one of the largest debts in the United States, Mr. Gardiner said. He cited an article on forbes.com that said student loan debt in 2020 was at about $1.56 trillion, the second highest consumer debt category after mortgage debt.
Mr. Gardiner suggested that Campus Bound collaborate with high school counselors to help families find financial aid for college to avoid loans they would need to pay back. He and Mr. Cohen presented the idea of finding donors to pay a fee to Campus Bound so it could offer its services to St. Bernard’s families free of charge. Principal Linda Anderson, and the school’s college counselor, Heather Weibel Tullio, “loved it!” Mr. Gardiner said.
Mr. Gardiner said he volunteered to find donors for the program at St. Bernard’s. He later helped start the program at three Catholic high schools in the Boston Archdiocese and three public high schools. He also told St. Paul Diocesan Jr./Sr. High School in Worcester about it.
Rollstone Bank & Trust in Fitchburg funded the pilot Campus Bound program at St. Bernard’s for about $2,500 the first year (the 2020-2021 academic year), he said. Avidia Bank in Leominster and a private donor funded the program the second year, and this year private donors are paying for it.
Mr. Gardiner said he, Mr. Cohen and others have formed a board for an organization called College Affordable and expect to get non-profit status in March, so donors can get tax deductions for supporting the program.
“The opportunity to educate and provide free personalized support to reduce the exorbitant cost of college is something that has … been a passion for me,” said Mr. Cohen. “The amazing collaboration with St. Bernard’s has allowed us to make a direct and meaningful impact on many families who would otherwise have no awareness about the various ways to reduce the cost of higher education.”
The Campus Bound program at St. Bernard’s includes group meetings for juniors’ parents, student group events, monthly webinars that anyone can watch live or later, and consultation with, and e-mail support from, Campus Bound team members.
Campus Bound’s “boot-camp” workshops for St. Bernard’s seniors, new last spring, helped them get more than $60,000 in scholarships from local businesses, triple the amount per student that previous classes got from businesses, Mr. Gardiner said.
While juniors and seniors are the program’s focus, freshmen, sophomores and graduates now in college can also access Campus Bound’s services free of charge through their participating school, he said.
The program at St. Bernard’s has helped about 100 students there, Mr. Gardiner said, including his other son and daughter.
Last spring, college costs for 23 St. Bernard’s graduates were reduced by more than $1.4 million, in part because of additional merit aid Campus Bound helped them find, he said.
“I have learned so much from the program,” said Ms. Tullio, St. Bernard’s college counselor. “I am better able to help my families. … To have financial experts a phone call away is terrific. I don’t know all the financial stuff so it’s been a Godsend. The biggest thing I’ve learned from them is the benefit of appealing” for merit aid.
 She said one student initially was offered no money from her chosen university. She appealed and was offered some money. By her third appeal letter that money had reached $20,000 per year, for a total of $80,000.
Benefits come in different ways.
Campus Bound found a college for Lindsey LeBlanc, daughter of Stephen and Jennifer LeBlanc.
As a St. Bernard’s junior, Lindsey received a scholarship from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, her father said.
“We had never even heard of it,” he said. “So we looked into it. … It met her interests. … She got a tremendous amount of merit aid right up front” – about half her tuition for the first year – so the family did not appeal for more. Lindsey is now a freshman at Le Moyne, where she plays soccer.
“Ultimately, it means our students are able to attend not just any college, but often their first-choice colleges, and without necessarily having to worry about being in debt for the rest of their lives,” said Mrs. Anderson, St. Bernard’s principal.
“Catholic schools need to show parents, who are paying tuition, a return on investment,” Mr. Gardiner said, so the Campus Bound program is a “good selling point” for St. Bernard’s.