The Los Compañeros program brings undergraduate and graduate students into high schools and middle schools to promote academic and personal success through culturally relevant mentoring. During a recent visit to Washington Middle School’s family center in Albuquerque, students clustered according to immigrant status (with American-born kids of Mexican parents congregating in one group, the Mexican immigrants in another, and so on). High school and college students helped the middle-schoolers with their schoolwork, acculturation and social development.
The children are well aware of the immigration debate that raged in Congress this spring, including a proposal to make felons of people who are in the country illegally.
“Kids with illegal relatives at home tend to shrink from public engagement at schools for fear of drawing attention to the family,” says Alex Chough, associate director of policy, research and evaluation services at the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships. Threatening to make felons of illegal immigrants “will drive parents deeper underground and make them less involved in school,” he says.
“A lot of the students have just gotten here from Mexico,” says Bluitt. “I had students who were having problems at home. A lot of them were living with grandparents they called ‘mom and dad.’ Some of the parents were in jail or in another state. ... A lot of them are here illegally. They come here for a better life.”
As a Latina herself, Bluitt says she understands cultural issues, such as machismo and the tyranny of low expectations, which can undermine college aspirations. “They feel like they’re going to be made fun of,” she says of students on the periphery. “As a Mexicana (an American-born child of Mexican parents), I always underestimated myself. ... No one told me I could take AP classes or honors classes.”
Bluitt, who is married and raising two children of her own, sees her role with Los Compañeros as being a crucial catalyst for change. “As long as you help that one student, that student will help another,” she says.
“Parents need to be very involved if they want their children to succeed,” Bluitt adds. The biggest hurdle that underserved children must overcome is “not believing in themselves. They take every little thing as a sign that ‘I can’t go to college.’ Sometimes they just need somebody to say ‘Good job! I knew you could do this.’ ”
Jacqueline Montoya, a 10th-grader who wants to be an engineer, began hanging out at an ENLACE family center that is frequented by her adult aunt, Brenda Chavez. ENLACE is “an opportunity to keep me out of trouble,” says Jacqueline, who sees danger at every turn. Her friend, a former cheerleader and straight-A student, dropped out of school last year when she became pregnant. Jacqueline’s father, who has struggled with drugs, is absent. Then there are the gangs, which have flourished in Albuquerque for generations. “Gangs are a big problem,” says Jacqueline’s mother, Sharon Montoya, who works in a public school. “I hear kids say: ‘I can drop out and sell drugs.’ ”
Chough, of the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships, points to studies that show “students set academic ambitions no later than seventh grade, but for a seventh-grade Latino student, there are barriers everywhere.”
“Our model for higher education just isn’t working for lower-income students,” says Chough. Many of those barriers are perceptual, he adds, noting that Latino families consistently overestimate the cost of college, a miscalculation that can have dire consequences.
“If you don’t think you can afford college, why take chemistry and physics?” asks David Murray, president of Murray & Associates and the National Center for College Costs, which helps families prepare for college, in part by helping them to understand college costs.
Murray and his staff offer workshops for students at middle schools and high schools that serve high percentages of low-income, potentially first-generation college students. When families have the tools to demystify the processes of college admissions and financial aid, students are more likely to take rigorous high school classes, earn more honors diplomas, score higher on the SAT, and change their college enrollment plans, Murray says. Programs like these are vital, he says, because too little public money is available to offer such programs in schools where they’re needed most.
“When it comes to investing in education, for the last 20 years, nationally, we’ve lost sight of that investment. It’s all coming home to roost now,” Murray warns. “If we don’t get a handle on that and get the investment back into education, we’re going to suffer serious economic and social consequences.”
A transformative program begins with one person
Teenagers Chase Frazer and Tamica Barnett had no reason to believe that a savior would appear to them at the Fayette Street Boys and Girls Club in Syracuse, N.Y. They figured the first time they met Virginia Donohue would be the last.“When Ginny showed up (in 1999), there had been a lot of people coming into the inner city trying to start programs, and we figured that she was just another person coming in trying to get government money,” said Chase, 22. “Ginny kept coming back every single week. People started to notice that she cared about what was happening with kids in the community.”
Donohue is the founder and driving force behind On Point for College, a nonprofit organization that helps inner-city students get into college. She and the program’s two full-time counselors work on the theory that little things can make a big difference. They help students with financial aid forms, transcripts, immunizations, mentoring, test taking, campus visits, precollege orientations and other aspects of paving the way to college. The program has paid fees to release transcripts needed by students seeking to transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. One time Donohue even wrote out a personal check for $35 to cover the cost of a student’s language proficiency test – a last-minute rescue that prevented the student from forfeiting $35,000 in scholarships.
About the same time that Chase met Donohue, he lost his best friend – a young man gunned down on the streets of Syracuse. Chase had befriended the teen after moving east a few years earlier with his family to escape street violence in Los Angeles. Chase’s father is in prison, serving a life sentence.
“On Point was a great help in getting me really excited about college,” says Chase, a senior at the State University of New York-Albany. His goal is to earn a doctorate and become a college professor. “I don’t think Ginny knows how much of a change she’s actually made.”
 | Chase Frazer, a 22-year-old senior at the State University of New York-Albany, talks about college dreams with Emmanuel Flowers, a fifth-grader at Martin Luther King School in Syracuse, N.Y. The discussion was part of the Early Awareness Program of On Point for College, a Syracuse-based pre-college awareness and access organization. |
Before meeting Donohue, Tamica Barnett had spent her entire life in a crime- and drug-ridden Syracuse neighborhood. She had moved out of her parents’ house and taken up residence with her grandparents, near the Boys and Girls Club.
“I had a few friends who got caught up hanging out on the block, friends who got pregnant – the norm,” Tamica recalls. “If it wasn’t for On Point, I honestly don’t think I would have gone to college. I really didn’t have the parental support. … “I didn’t know the first thing about filling out financial aid papers.”
With help from On Point, Tamica found her way out of the streets and into St. Bonaventure University, a private Catholic university three hours away. She graduated recently and now aspires to earn an MBA degree.
It can be dangerous for Syracuse teens to venture into unfamiliar neighborhoods – three kids in the program were murdered last year – so On Point comes to them, making regularly scheduled visits to 15 or so Boys and Girls Clubs and other places where students gather, such as the Southwest Community Center.
During a recent visit there, Donohue and counselors Karaline Carr and Sam Rowser fielded questions and offered advice to several would-be students, including a 26-year-old single mother, a 1999 high school dropout who wanted to attend a nursing program.
About a third of the kids that On Point sends to college have a GED in lieu of a high school diploma, says Donohue. Many of those GEDs were earned in jail or prison. More than half of the African-American students who drop out of school can expect to be incarcerated, she says.
On Point connects with kids in part because the program is connected to the streets. Rowser understands that life. He’s from “the Bricks,” the term locals use for the brick buildings that constitute Syracuse’s housing project, and he’s had his share of troubles. (See Once refugees, now scholars for another tale from “the Bricks.”) When Rowser was younger, involvement with drugs bought him a two-year prison term, an experience that gives him credibility with some inner-city youngsters.
“When a kid comes to me and says, ‘I have a felony.’ I say, ‘Me, too.’ When a kid says, ‘I’ve been on crack,’ I say, ‘What’s next?’ I made some bad decisions and had to pay the consequences,” Rowser says. “I do what I do because I understand that kids make mistakes. ... It’s hard for the kids to see beyond what is immediately in front of them.”
On Point shepherds kids through the gauntlet of college admissions by breaking the process into manageable steps. Rowser says he is careful never to give prospective college students more than they can handle. Usually that means no more than three tasks at a time. “I try to not let them see the whole process,” he says. “You piecemeal it to them so that they don’t become overwhelmed.”
Several times a week, the program arranges to take students on visits to college campuses. Donohue has recruited some 90 volunteers to drive the vans, including Tom Young, a former mayor of Syracuse. On Point, which also ferries students to and from their campuses, logged 377 college trips last year alone.
“A big reason local kids fail is transportation,” says Donohue, who has seen students drop out of college for lack of a ride back to campus after coming home for Thanksgiving. “If it’s a choice between food and a bus ticket, food will always win.”
On Point acknowledges that poor, first-generation college students also need support after they enroll. The program provides students with clothing, bedding, backpacks and school supplies. It also tries to identify a campus “angel,” usually an admissions officer or a vice president, who will help students when problems arise.
To expand its reach, On Point enlists its “graduates” to recruit other kids into the program and to give campus tours when the program’s vans visit their colleges. Eager to reach youngsters earlier in the educational pipeline, On Point’s Early Awareness Program brings its ambassadors into community centers and elementary schools. Chase and Tamica recently spoke to a group of fifth-graders at Martin Luther King School, one of a dozen Syracuse schools that have asked On Point students to visit.
Chase and Tamica talked to the kids about the importance of staying in school and challenging themselves academically, and of associating with the right kinds of people. “College is essential,” Tamica told them.
She and Chase asked the youngsters what they want to be when they grow up. Hands flew into the air. Most of the kids said they want to be singers or professional athletes.
“They think they can be in the NBA or be a rapper, but that’s not real life,” Chase says later. “We have to change their perspective of what success is.”
Also in this issue of Focus magazine...
