BOWLING GREEN — Seanice Reynolds nearly gushes as she meets with Bowling Green State University President Mary Ellen Mazey.

“I love it here,” the freshman business major from Dayton tells Ms. Mazey.

“What do you love about it?” the president asks in a voice that is one part presidential, one part motherly.

“The people actually,” Miss Reynolds, 18, tells her. “Everybody is so nice and friendly.”

While she includes Ms. Mazey among those nice and friendly faces, not every one of BGSU’s 20,000-plus students will get the opportunity to meet, greet, and have lunch with the new president.

Miss Reynolds and at least three other BGSU students — Monica Buress of Dayton, and Taran Kimbrough and Clarence Jackson, both of Trotwood, a suburb of Dayton — have a special connection to Ms. Mazey.

All were part of Summerbridge Dayton — a program Ms. Mazey helped start — when they were seventh and eighth graders in Dayton- area public schools.

The program brought middle schoolers to Wright State University for six-week summer sessions in which they took classes taught by college students, participated in campus and community events, and got a feel for college.

Ms. Mazey, who will be inaugurated Friday as the 11th president of BGSU, was dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Wright State in 2000 when a graduate student, Dawayne Kirkman, approached her about starting Summerbridge.

“He said, ‘I was the first member of my family to ever graduate from high school,’?” she recalled. “ ‘I had the good fortune of going to a Summerbridge program and Upward Bound and it’s what really changed my life.’ He said, ‘I’d give anything to start one here at Wright State.’ “

They began writing proposals for funding, getting rejections, and, finally, landing a $100,000 grant from the Iddings Foundation of Dayton. By summer, the first group of Summerbridge students arrived.

Ms. Mazey said she was sold on the program from the beginning.

“They say that seventh and eighth grade is a critical period in a student’s life when they’re motivated in terms of their future,” she said.

Eighteen-year-old Monica Buress, a freshman nursing major at BGSU, said her two years in Summerbridge followed by two years in Upward Bound — a federal program aimed at helping low-income high school students complete college — were crucial for her.

“Without this program, I probably wouldn’t have come to college,” Miss Buress said, explaining that her mother and other family members had not gone to college. “My Mom didn’t know how to seek help, like ACT help, SAT. She didn’t know anything about the college process so if it wasn’t for Upward Bound and Summerbridge, I wouldn’t know anything about college.”

Taran Kimbrough, a junior political science major, said both of his parents graduated from college, but he still benefited from Summerbridge.

“It was the first college campus I’d ever been on, and it gave me a feel for what college would be like,” he said. “I think Summerbridge made me a better student because it taught me how to manage my time.”

Patricia Jones, who was director of Summerbridge Dayton, said the program ended in 2009 primarily because of a lack of funding.

“I think when President Mazey left, the love of the program left with her and there was no advocate to carry that on,” she said. “It also got harder and harder to find funding. We held on by a thread as long as we could.”

Some 150 middle school students completed the two-year program at Wright State, another 100 or so spent at least a year in it.

“The goal was to prepare them for high school and subsequently to prepare them for college, to get them onto a college campus, to get them excited about being around college students, and to get them in college classrooms in classes taught by college students,” Ms. Jones said. “We developed a partnership with the College of Education and Human Services, and it worked well because prospective teachers could come in and get experience working with urban students. “

Ms. Mazey said she would love to launch a Summerbridge program at BGSU — such programs exist across the country — if she could find the support and the funding.

For now, she’s thrilled that some students whose college careers may have been launched by the program at Wright State are now with her at BGSU.

“I’m very proud of them — very, very proud of them,” Ms. Mazey said, adding that she thinks of all the students as her kids. “I always say I raised two sons and now I’ve got about 20,000 sons and daughters.”

Contact Jennifer Feehan at: jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-724-6129.

First Published November 26, 2011, 5:00 a.m.