MCPS Recognized This Summer RISE Host for Work Its Interns Actually Shipped
- Whitney Ramirez, AFC
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
Montgomery County Public Schools presented Diapers 2 Deposits, Inc. with its Summer RISE 2026 Host Certificate of Appreciation on August 7, closing a five-week placement in which 10 rising juniors and seniors worked on things the company depends on.
The certificate, signed by Summer RISE Coordinator Davida Gurstelle, recognizes hosts who helped students engage in hands-on career-based learning that informed their decisions about life after high school. D2D has hosted before. What makes this cohort worth writing up is not the award. It is what the 10 students left behind.
For anyone weighing youth workforce development in Maryland right now, that distinction is the whole question. The state has spent three years building service and workforce pathways for young adults. The programs are funded. Whether a placement produces anything is still down to the host.
What Summer RISE actually requires
Summer RISE is run by MCPS and matches rising juniors and seniors with a career-based learning placement. The 2026 program ran June 22 through July 24, five weeks, with a minimum of 50 hours, in person, virtual, or a mix.
It has been running since 2017. Hosts are assigned a teacher liaison and validate the student's 50 hours at the end. Students also have to complete a professional skills and financial literacy workshop on top of the placement hours before they get their stipend.
That last requirement is worth sitting with. MCPS already treats financial literacy as a condition of completing a workforce program. It is not an add-on the district is being talked into.
Fifty hours is a real commitment for a teenager and a small one for a business. Which is why a lot of placements fill it with observation: shadow a meeting, sit in on a call, write a reflection. Nothing wrong with that. It just doesn't produce anything, for the student or the host.
What the 10 interns did instead
D2D runs its placement on one rule, stated publicly for every cohort it has hosted: give a young person a real seat at the table.
This summer that produced a working portfolio.
Hiring. Interns sat on the panel interviewing candidates for the company's Google News newsroom operation, evaluating real applicants for a real role.
Measurement. Four interns built more than 100 pre and post-assessment forms, the instruments D2D uses to document learning gains across its programs.
Media. Others rebuilt sections of the company's YouTube channel.
Curriculum. Interns loaded complete financial literacy lessons into Planbook, the lesson-management platform the instructional team uses.
All 10 worked directly with the full staff across curriculum, media, and operations. There was no separate intern track.
Read that list again from the company's side. Those are not enrichment exercises with a real-work veneer. The assessment forms are the instruments the organization's own outcome reporting rests on. The hiring panel evaluated candidates for a role that was actually filled. If a placement is designed so that a student's output can be quietly discarded in August, it was never real work.
Why the seat at the table is a design choice
This is the same sequence D2D uses in its classrooms. The F.A.S.T. Framework, which stands for FinancialField Trips, Applications, Standards, and Theory, leads with real-world experience and brings theory in behind it.
An intern who has scored actual hiring candidates, or built the assessment forms an entire program's outcome data depends on, has done applications-first learning in exactly that order. The framework was not adapted for the internship. The internship is the framework.
It reflects the working thesis of founder Whitney Ramirez, AFC, the Accredited Financial Counselor who designed the curriculum: young people rise to the level of responsibility they are actually given. That is easy to say and expensive to mean. Meaning it requires handing a 16-year-old something you cannot afford to have done badly.
How this maps onto Maryland's own program design
Here is the part that should interest workforce boards.
Maryland has built real youth workforce development infrastructure over the past three years. It runs the Service Year Option, launched in October 2023 as the first program of its kind in the country, alongside Maryland Corps. Both place young adults with host site partners. The state publishes what it expects from those hosts, and the list is specific.
Maryland host site partner requirement | What the Summer RISE placement did |
|---|---|
Meaningful work experiences | Hiring panel, assessment instruments, curriculum loading, channel rebuild |
On-site supervision | Interns embedded with curriculum, media, and operations staff |
An assigned mentor for every member | Direct work with the full team, no separate intern track |
Structured professional development | Public speaking and interpersonal coaching, carried by past cohorts |
Wraparound support including financial literacy | The organization's core service |
A measured transition toward employment, education, or training | Pre and post-assessment discipline applied to its own programs |
The Maryland Department of Service and Civic Innovation's host site partner criteria call for meaningful work, on-site supervision and professional development, job training, an on-site mentor for every member, and wraparound services including financial literacy. On the member side, the state pairs participants with a success coach, requires professional development covering financial literacy and public speaking, and offers a Department of Labor registered apprenticeship pathway and a $6,000 completion award.
The overlap is not a coincidence. It is the same problem: how do you give a young person real responsibility and then prove something changed. A high school placement is shorter and unpaid, but the architecture is the one Maryland has already decided works.
Five things to ask a financial education provider for young adults
For state agencies, host-site partners, and workforce boards evaluating providers, the Summer RISE model points at five practical criteria. None of them are about brochures.
Curriculum built for young adults, not repackaged from a middle school unit. These are learners earning real income and making real credit decisions. Ask to see the materials.
Evidence, specifically. Pre and post assessment instruments, completion rates, measured score gains, and attendance counts. If a provider cannot show you the instrument, the numbers are decoration.
Facilitation depth. Can the same facilitator hold a 15-person cohort and a large regional convening with equal command? Those are different skills and most providers only have one.
Coach and mentor training. The adults closest to participants determine whether anything carries over between sessions. A provider who trains only its own facilitators is solving half the problem.
Capacity across the state. Multiple sites, multiple partners, multi-year contract performance. Organizations that already operate this way leave a trail of measurable outcomes and repeated institutional recognition.
D2D's work with Montgomery College and its position on the Blueprint for Maryland's Future financial literacy gap are part of that trail.
FAQ
What is MCPS Summer RISE?
Summer RISE is a career-based learning program run by Montgomery County Public Schools for rising juniors and seniors. The 2026 program ran June 22 to July 24, five weeks, with a minimum of 50 hours at a host business, agency, or nonprofit. Students also complete a professional skills and financial literacy workshop.
What does a Summer RISE host actually have to do?
Hosts provide the career-based experience, work with an assigned MCPS teacher liaison, and validate the student's 50 hours. Beyond that, the depth of the placement is the host's call, which is why the range between observation and real work is so wide.
How is this different from a normal high school internship?
The difference is whether the student's output matters after they leave. In this cohort, interns built assessment instruments the organization uses to report outcomes and sat on a hiring panel for a role that was filled. Work that can be discarded in August was never real.
How does a high school placement relate to Maryland's Service Year Option?
They serve different ages, but the design is the same. Maryland's host site partner criteria call for meaningful work, on-site supervision, an assigned mentor, professional development, and financial literacy support. A well-built high school placement runs on the same architecture at a shorter length.
What should a workforce board look for in a financial education provider?
Curriculum designed for young adults, pre and post assessment instruments you can actually inspect, facilitators who work at both cohort and convening scale, mentor and coach training, and multi-site multi-year delivery history.
The part worth stealing
The certificate says the placement helped students make decisions about life after high school. That is the outcome the program is built for, and it is a low bar to clear on paper and a hard one to clear honestly.
The thing worth copying here is not the specific projects. It is the rule underneath them: if a young person's work can be thrown away without anyone noticing, it was not a placement, it was a five-week tour. Hand them something you need done.
If you run a youth workforce development program, a district partnership, or a service-year host site and want financial education built for young adults with the assessment discipline to prove it worked, start with the Diapers 2 Deposits capability statement or the programs for organizations overview.
