LEWISTON – After helping hundreds of Lewiston High School students go to college, next year Joan Macri will be there herself.

On June 20, Macri will leave the high school to work for the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College in a program designed to boost college aspirations of students in seven area high schools.

“It’s bittersweet,” Macri said. “I’m doing a lot of playing tricks with myself to get through this.”

In the past five years, she spearheaded one initiative after another to boost the number of college-bound students.

She set up an aspirations lab where students could drop in for one-on-one help; took sophomores on college visits; set up an Early College program for juniors and seniors to take college classes for credit; and held workshops to help students and parents fill out financial aid forms.

Statistics show results.

In 2000, 58 percent of Lewiston seniors said they intended to go to college, compared to 87 percent in 2007. Five months after the Class of 2007 graduated, 78 percent were in college.

The improvement was noticed inside and outside Lewiston.

“She’s changed how educational institutions think about who can go to college, which is almost everybody from the lower third to the top,” said Androscoggin Chamber of Commerce President Chip Morrison.

Macri has introduced students to college and helped them get there, Morrison said. “She talks to them, one at a time, and says, ‘You can succeed at this.’ These are kids who nobody in their family went to college.”

A Philadelphia native, Macri, 60, followed her lawyer husband to Lewiston. She began teaching in Lewiston in 1984.

The aspirations lab was created in 2003 “kind of by accident,” she said. Guidance counselor Jim Larouche was retiring. The principal suggested Macri write a grant to get money to fund a mentor to replace Larouche. Her grant was funded, and the principal asked Macri to take the job.

“It really was not my intention,” she said. But she started as the aspirations leader part time, teaching one day, working on her project the next. The first six months she researched and discovered two things, that early college courses were available, and that students needed individual help applying to colleges. “That’s how the aspirations lab got started,” she said.

Once the lab was open, she had other ideas. Early College was started in 2004. Each year since, about 100 upperclassmen have earned college credit before leaving high school.

She wrote a grant to take half the sophomore class to visit colleges. She got a call from the foundation saying it wanted to double her budget so she could take the entire sophomore class.

Macri said she took on the aspirations work because “without some form of post-secondary training, the students who I love so much will have limits placed on their potential. We all want our students to reach their true potential.”

The aspirations lab would not have been successful, she said, without help from faculty, parents, administrators and the school board.

At each high school graduation, seniors decide who will be their keynote speaker. This year they chose Macri.

When the class president and vice president asked her to speak, “I burst into tears,” she said. “I was tremendously honored, then terrified.”

She’s telling herself, “I’m not the graduation speaker; I’m the graduation teacher.”

Working at the high school “has been wonderful,” she said. “If I start talking about it, I will get teary.”