Children to Receive an Education About College

Looking out at a sea of sixth-graders at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez envisioned a roomful of future Cal State University graduates.

He could see budding lawyers, doctors and teachers. Maybe even an aspiring city leader or two.

Problem is, when Lopez showed up last week to lay out the steps necessary for the students to get into Ventura County’s fledgling four-year college, most of the students had no idea the campus existed, much less what it would take to attend.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Lopez, kicking off a countywide campaign to help students prepare for entry to Cal State Channel Islands, set to open near Camarillo in fall 2002.

“It’s our responsibility to make sure that the children of our community know what they need to do to go to the university,” he told these sons and daughters of immigrant laborers. “We want as many of you as possible to complete your studies and come back and teach our children.”

At the heart of the outreach effort is a step-by-step checklist created by CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed and being distributed to schools across the state.

The checklist is designed to inform students, beginning in the sixth grade, what courses they need to earn admittance to the Cal State system.

It also spells out requirements for college entrance exams, minimum grade point average and deadlines for college applications and requests for financial aid.

The CSU system printed 80,000 classroom posters outlining the entrance requirements, plus another 100,000 leaflets--in English and Spanish--for students to take home, pin on their refrigerators and share with their parents.

“I’m convinced that if students know what the expectations are they will rise to meet them,” Reed said last week. “What that chart represents to me is a road map to opportunity. If you follow it, you get the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Laying out those expectations and entry requirements is especially important in Ventura County, Reed said, where generations of students have grown up without the academic awareness that comes with having a four-year university nearby.

And no one has done more with Reed’s “road map” than university officials and community leaders in Ventura County.

Officials from the planned university distributed 6,000 of the posters last week to local superintendents and soon hope to provide the smaller version to 36,000 sixth- to 12th-grade students countywide.

Moreover, Lopez and his wife, Irma, are working with university officials to launch a speakers’ bureau to spread the word on the county’s new Cal State campus, under development at the former Camarillo State Hospital site.

Irma Lopez said the need to talk up the university is especially critical for local Latino students, who attend Cal State campuses at less than half the rate of their peers across the state.

“It’s important for everyone, but it’s especially important for Latino students to know what’s out there and to start aiming early for a four-year college,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is establish a tradition of having students and their parents think as early as possible about what it will take to go to college.”

With good reason.

Despite its relative affluence and top-caliber schools, Ventura County lags behind counties of comparable size and wealth when it comes to shepherding students to college.

It has the sixth-highest income in the state, but ranks 17th in the number of high school graduates who meet UC and CSU entrance requirements. And it sinks to the bottom third of the state’s 58 counties when comparing the number of high school graduates who go on to Cal State campuses.

The statistics are even more alarming for Latino students, university officials say. Only 2.8% of Latinos who graduated from Ventura County high schools in 1998 made their way to a CSU campus, compared with 6% statewide.

Art Flores, an associate vice president at Cal State Channel Islands, said part of the university’s $10-million budget allocation next fiscal year will go toward hiring three outreach and recruitment workers.

But Flores, the youngest of eight children and the only one in his family to attend college, is also taking it upon himself to make sure local students know the campus will soon be available to them.

He joined the Lopezes, Oxnard School District Supt. Richard Duarte and Cesar Chavez Principal Julia Villalpando last week at the elementary school in Oxnard’s poverty-plagued La Colonia neighborhood.

“The university is CSU Channel Islands, it’s in Camarillo and it’s your university,” he told the youngsters in English and Spanish.

“Starting with sixth grade, you can start planning your college career,” he continued. “We’d like to help each and every student to get into the university system, but especially Cal State Channel Islands.”

The object lesson was not lost on sixth-grade teacher Maria Ramos.

Just as soon as each of her 30 students had the college requirements in hand, Ramos reviewed the information with the youngsters to make sure they understood what was at stake.

For homework, she even had the students take the checklist home and review it with their parents.

By this time, according to the checklist, the students should have already visited middle school counselors and scheduled courses in algebra, geometry and foreign languages. They should also have attended college information programs and gone on a field trip to the nearest CSU campus.

Most students hadn’t done any of those things. Not to worry, Ramos said, it’s not too late to catch up.

“Make sure you read what you need to do every year,” said Ramos, a mother of two who grew up in one of La Colonia’s public housing projects, and went on to graduate from Cal State Bakersfield and earn her teaching credential from Cal State Northridge.

“If you were all my kids, you would all be going to a university,” she said, “even if I had to walk you there every day.”