Lancers for a Day, Lancers for Life

“Lancer for a Day is an opportunity for Prince Edward fourth-graders to see themselves on a college campus, to feel a part of the college campus that’s in their hometown, to think about how classes connect to careers, and to just imagine themselves as college students one day,” said Dr. Angela McDonald, dean of the College of Education, Health, and Human Services. “They get the entire college experience, from taking our honor pledge and agreeing to adhere to the ethics and values all our students abide by, to attending class with faculty and thinking deeply like a college student.”

The program won this year’s Virginia School-University Partnership Project Award, presented by Virginia Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators (VACTE), which recognizes collaborative projects that promote student learning, well-being and improvement of teacher preparation. Longwood’s submission, formally titled “Fostering Civic Engagement through Collaboration: A Model Partnership Between Higher Education and a Rural Elementary School,” detailed the long-running program born of a collaboration between the Longwood College of Education, Health, and Human Services and Prince Edward County Public Schools.

This year’s event included more than 100 fourth-grade students, nearly half of whom said this was their first time on a college campus. Their energy was palpable from the second they deboarded their yellow school buses, as Prince Edward teachers, Longwood faculty and Longwood education majors—who will soon be teachers themselves—corralled them into Jarman Hall for an opening assembly. Dr. Becca Brusseau, Longwood’s program coordinator for elementary and middle school education, began the day by asking the students if they were excited for the day, excited to go to college and excited to go to the dining hall and get ice cream. The latter drew the biggest cheers.

Together, they recited Longwood’s honor pledge—”We shall not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.”—and heard from Longwood faculty like Brusseau and McDonald, and students studying to become future educators like Aidan Brown ’26 and Anthony Rucci ’27.

“We’re not saying you have to go to college, but we want you to have a dream,” Brusseau told them. “We want you to picture yourself as a Longwood student or in your career. You can become anything you choose to become if you set a goal and work for it.”

Soon that mental image of becoming a college student became a reality for those in attendance. Led by multiple Longwood students—who wore red hats to stand out as they guided their groups through a sea of undergraduates walking to and from class—the fourth-graders dispersed to various academic buildings.

Some visited Chichester Hall where Dr. Ben Campbell, associate professor of science education and biology, led a class where students identified characteristics of different animal skulls and attempted to draw conclusions about how each animal lived. Another group visited The Edward I. Gordon, M.D., Clinical Simulation Learning Center (CSLC) in Stevens Hall where associate professor of nursing Dr. Kathryn Miller introduced them to state-of-the-art manikins, whom the students diagnosed based on symptoms shared by the imaginary patient. Others attended classes for cryptography, communication sciences and disorders, music, Spanish, therapeutic recreation, video production and writing—all of which featured thought-provoking, kid-friendly activities related to their specific subjects.

By 11 a.m., the Prince Edward Eagles-turned-Lancers made their way to the dining hall where the highlight of the day for many awaited. Piling high their trays with slices of pizza, fruit, cookies and ice cream—sometimes on the same plate—the students stood in line shoulder-to-shoulder with Longwood students before retreating to the Lee Grand Dining Room for lunch.

More classes and a wiggle break with the True Blue Stomp N’ Shake cheer team followed in the afternoon before the students eventually reconvened in Jarman Hall for the culmination of Lancer for a Day: a graduation ceremony and formal initiation as Lancers. The students heard from familiar faces like Prince Edward Elementary Principal Teresa Vance, M.S. ’10 and fourth-grade teacher Ms. Ann Dunbar, as well as two of their peers, Scarlett Grant and Ameer Johnson, who eloquently delivered a joint speech they wrote and rehearsed the week prior.

“Have you ever had a day where you felt like your future got bigger?” asked Johnson in his opening line. “Well today was that day for us.”

“Today was very fun and entertaining, and everyone was very nice and kind,” added Grant, whose parents, Heather Grant ’07 and J.T. Grant ’08, are both Longwood alumni. “My favorite thing was nursing. We had to figure out what happened with the manikin. It had bad stomach problems and a bad heart rate.”

Since its launch, Lancer for a Day has become a highlight for fourth-graders at Prince Edward, which sits less than three miles from Longwood’s campus. Initiated by professor of education and special education Dr. Patti Hastings more than a decade ago, the event has immersed more than 1,000 elementary students in the college experience and strengthened both professional and academic pipelines with the only public school division in Farmville, America’s oldest two-college town.

“It’s important that our relationship with our neighboring school divisions, Prince Edward specifically, goes beyond a reciprocal relationship,” McDonald said. “Placing student-teachers there so they can get experience and so Prince Edward can get more trained educators is the first level of what that partnership can be. But we have a responsibility as members of this community to go beyond that. We want to be a source of inspiration for kids in this community. To go to a K-12 school in a town that has two colleges, you shouldn’t leave without being on those campuses and without being able to identify with the college experience.”

Lancer for a Day is a significant, recurring source of that inspiration. Vance, who earned her Master of Education at Longwood in 2010, said the five hours her students spend on Longwood’s campus can have a lifetime impact.

“For students who’ve never thought about college before, suddenly now they realize what it’s all about,” she said. “They get excited about it and realize that it’s real and it could happen to them. It makes it tangible.”