Chestertown, Md. — The moment Isaiah Reese set foot on the idyllic campus of Washington College, a private liberal arts school on Maryland’s eastern shore, he knew he didn’t want to go there. At the time, he was a high school senior on a school tour. “I told myself I was not going to this school, no matter what,” Reese, who is now a freshman at the college, said over a slice of pizza and a spinach wrap burrito in Washington College’s polished cafeteria overlooking one of the school’s greens. Though Chestertown, Md., where the college is located, is just 75 miles from Reese’s native Baltimore, the quaint, roughly 5,000 person boating town struck Reese as almost a different universe from the mostly African-American high school he was attending at the time. “They gave us a tour of the school and I’m still saying nope, nope, this town is old, it’s boring,” he said. But then Reese had a conversation with a Washington College staffer that started to make him change his mind. “As soon as he said ‘full ride’ I was like, ‘Uh-huh, okay,’” Reese recalled at his cafeteria table in a hat emblazoned with Washington College’s logo. The 19-year-old is now one of 14 students in the inaugural year of George’s Brigade, a prestigious scholarship program and the brainchild of Sheila Bair, president of Washington College and the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The program, which is named for George Washington — also the college’s namesake — offers promising students from low-income backgrounds a full-ride to the school, including room and board, and caps their student loan borrowing for any other incidentals at $2,500 year. Just tuition at the school for the 2016-2017 academic year was more than $42,000 a year. But George’s Brigade is about more than meeting students’ financial needs. It’s also about ensuring they enjoy and make it through school, according to Bair. She first came up with the idea shortly after arriving at the college and researching some of the challenges low-income and first generat