Lean on Me : As Mentors, College Students Reach Out to Young Blacks in High School

The assignment--to list three personal strengths or successes--drew jokes from the other students. Monica Geary had just one question.

“You only want three?” the Anaheim High School junior asked, ready to supply more.

Charlie Fields scribbled “girls” on a sheet of notebook paper and held it up for a buddy to appreciate. When pressed, however, he grew serious.

“I’m good with computers,” Fields said. “And nowadays, you have to know about computers to get a good job.”

Self-examination, often cloaked in humor, is an important part of the lunchtime meetings between about 20 black students at Anaheim High School and three black mentors, who are undergraduates from Cal State Fullerton. It is also a rare chance for the high school group, which includes about half of the Anaheim school’s black enrollment, to be a majority within the student body of 2,100.

“White students treat me like a black person,” 17-year-old Geary explained. “Black people just see me as a person.”

For black teen-agers, attending school in predominantly white Orange County can be an isolating experience. Blacks represent an estimated 1.6% of the county population, and there are few local role models, teachers or others of the same race to offer encouragement and a sense of belonging.

Black undergraduates from Cal State Fullerton hope to fill that void and, not incidentally, bring more minority students to their university. As part of a mentor program begun last fall, Cal State Fullerton student teams go to four Orange County high schools twice a month to befriend black students and help them prepare for both the personal and academic rigors of college.

The participating schools--Buena Park High, Fullerton High, Anaheim High and Valencia High in Placentia--each have a black enrollment of less than 2%, according to Thomas Coley, the architect of Cal State Fullerton’s program.

The minority mentoring program is one of a handful operating in Orange County under the state Student Opportunity and Access Program and through colleges and universities including UC Irvine, Fullerton College and Cypress College.

Mentoring within the Cal State Fullerton program works in three ways: It is intended to forge bridges between the college mentors and the high school students, to help the mentors form friendships among their peers and to help the mentors develop leadership skills and succeed at Cal State Fullerton. Black business leaders also help the high school and college students prepare for career demands during monthly forums.

The pilot program, initiated by Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb, grew out of concern over a drop in black enrollment in the School of Business Administration and Economics from 2.7% in 1980 to 2% in 1986. Total black enrollment at the university last fall was 588, about 2.4% of the 24,700 students.

Grants totaling $30,000 from the Educational Foundation for Black Americans in Long Beach and the 21st Century Foundation in New York provide $900 scholarships for 12 undergraduate mentors and also pay for campus excursions for the high school students.

The mentors meet with John Lafky, Cal State Fullerton program coordinator, before each high school session to prepare discussion topics, such as college admission requirements, career planning, personal values and college life.

“We’re trying to provide supports,” said Coley, who has a Ph.D. in educational administration and is executive assistant to Cobb. “This program gives the mentors a positive network of friends and gets them involved in something on this commuter campus. It also helps the high school students to see that college is a possibility, and not to see high school as the end, or maybe not even get through high school.”

Coley said he recognizes how difficult the “sense of aloneness” can be for minority individuals in an over-whelmingly non-minority environment, particularly as they try to fit in at a large and unfamiliar school.

Coley, who is black, attended segregated schools in St. Augustine, Fla., before moving at age 15 to an integrated community in New Jersey. From there, he went to Moorhead State College in northern Minnesota, where there were 76 blacks among 4,000 undergraduates.

“I was probably the first black person that some students at Moorhead had ever seen in their lifetime,” Coley said. “Already as a black person, you stand out as different in that kind of environment. Who needs that burden when you have to maintain a level of academic competitiveness?”

Milton King, a mentor at Fullerton High School, said he recalls his first few weeks at Cal State Fullerton as being stressful. But King said race had little to do with his unease. A junior marketing major, he is president of the university’s Black Business School Assn.

“It was a little bit frightening,” he said. “Cal State Fullerton seemed like such a large place, and to not know anyone was a big change from high school, where I knew everyone. I think it helps the high school students to hear from people who have already made the transition.”

For Anthony Elliot, a Cal State Fullerton history student who plans to become a teacher, his work on the mentoring team at Anaheim High School “is great experience--it will look great on my resume.” He estimated that five of the 20 to 25 students in the Anaheim group will choose to attend college at the Fullerton campus.

Monique Johnson, another mentor at Anaheim, advised the teen-agers during a recent session to consider a fall-back career when they choose their college major. She also told them not to hesitate to seek tutoring if they believe they are falling behind.

“I think at the begining of the program, the high school students saw this as a way to get out of class,” said Johnson, a business administration and criminal justice major at Fullerton. “Now, they miss us if we skip a session, like over Christmas break. They are using us as examples.”

Some of the high school students don’t understand the skills they need to succeed in college, Johnson said. Others assert lofty goals without any idea of how to achieve them.

Several of the boys said they want to be professional sports stars, and one girl said she wants to be a lawyer but doesn’t know what it takes. Another student said he is “doing good in school,” and added, “I’m passing all of my classes except two.”

Others, however, are strong students with clear goals. Monica Geary, who listed her strengths as “creativity, ambition and determination,” said she wants to be an interior designer and plans to enroll in a Los Angeles design school when she graduates from Anaheim High next year.

“The mentor program has brought me closer to the other black students in my school and it has really made me think about my college choices,” she said. “The mentors are really here for us as a shoulder to lean on, or an adviser. It is a lot easier to talk to them because they’re not that much older.”

Charlie Fields predicted that more of his black classmates at Anaheim will go on to college because of the mentor program.

“It gives us a better idea of what college is all about,” he said. “I want to study engineering and science, and I know I can ask the mentors for advice.”

Many of the students in the mentor programs have no one else to ask about college, because they may be the first in their families to consider higher education, according to Anaheim Principal Maggie Carrillo.

“The college mentors are sharing their success and some of the potential obstacles,” she said. “It also reinforces the possibilities that exist for the students if they start planning early in their high school careers. I think a program like this would be a benefit to all kids.”