Steering Latinos Toward College

Latino students in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties are the target of a new outreach and research project that is being called the most ambitious effort yet to boost their enrollment in four-year colleges.

The $1.5-million plan, developed by a team at UC Santa Barbara, includes educating families about college options, showing bilingual public-service commercials and video histories of Latino leaders on cable-access stations, and assigning Latino college students as mentors to grade-schoolers.

“We feel there is a really urgent situation out there, and we want to do something about it,” said UCSB sociology professor Denise Segura, a co-director of the project. “Latinos represent a majority of schoolchildren in California, yet only 4% are eligible to attend UC campuses. That is just not acceptable.”

Ventura County Latino leaders applauded the endeavor, calling it long overdue. Many Latino youths historically have been discouraged by parents and schools from preparing for college, which has only fueled the community’s cycle of poverty, Santa Paula Councilwoman Laura Flores Espinosa said.

“That has to be turned around,” she said. “Education plays such a vital role in the economic stability of the community.”

Marcos Vargas, a longtime Latino education leader and advocate for the working poor, said every effort to recruit--and particularly to retain--Latino students in college is critical for the entire region.

“Given the dismantling of affirmative action at the state level, this is a very important effort to address a tremendous problem,” he said.

The project has already begun in one sociology class at UCSB, where students--including a few from Ventura County--are being trained as mentors for Isla Vista Elementary School sixth-graders. This fall, they will begin, along with students from Santa Barbara City College, working one-on-one with the youngsters and their families.

The push by UCSB is partly in response to anti-affirmative action policies adopted by the University of California in 1995 that caused enrollment among Latinos to drop significantly.

On Wednesday, UC regents unanimously voted to overturn that policy after a lobbying campaign led by Latino faculty and staff members. Though the move is considered largely symbolic--because a 1996 law bans preferential treatment based on race in state agencies--it underscores the need for the UCSB outreach project, Segura said.

In the last six years, the UC system “has really disenfranchised the poor,” she said, adding that 75% of Latinos in the United States are considered poor or marginally poor. In Ventura County, according to the 1990 U.S. census--the most recent figures available--about 15% of Latinos lived below the poverty line. “These are the people who can’t afford to live in places where schools have so many AP classes, giving those students extra points on their [grade point average]--and that is unfair.”

The $1.5-million private grant, one of two awarded in California, came from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation as part of its $28-million effort to improve education for Latinos nationwide.

After four years, Segura said she hopes to--at a minimum--double the number of Latino students in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties attending four-year universities. At the same time, she said, the study will produce data to help create education programs for Latinos throughout the country.

The effort is focused on three geographic clusters--Santa Barbara; Ventura, Santa Paula and Fillmore; and Oxnard. It involves school districts, community colleges, UCSB faculty and students as well as dozens of existing community groups and organizations. It aims to “strengthen the educational pathway” by stressing literacy for students in elementary grades, college preparation for high school students, and retention for college students.

Daunting Battle

They are going up against staggering statistics. In Ventura County alone:

* Latinos drop out of high school at twice the rate of whites.

* The percentage of Latino high school students who have completed the classes necessary to be admitted to the UC and Cal State systems is less than half that of whites.

* Latino students make up two-thirds of those enrolled in Ventura County’s Gateway continuation high school and Youth Authority school, although they make up only one-third of the total county population.

Faced with those realities, UCSB researchers developed the project--being dubbed Engaging Latino Communities for Education, or ENLACE.

“No one wants to reinvent the wheel,” Segura said. “The idea is, let’s see what is really working in these areas and let’s do more of that.”

Miguel Rodriguez can tell you what works and what doesn’t.

At age 14, he became interested in his neighborhood gang. With few positive role models and a demanding job after school to help his single, working mom make ends meet, he was failing nearly all of his classes.

As a sophomore, he was sent to a weekend camp for new-citizen Latinos with a group called Future Leaders of America.

Though skeptical and resistant at first, Miguel, now 17, continued attending the camp sessions. During one exercise aimed at boosting self-esteem, he said, the message finally got to him.

Soon, he began speaking up more in class, studying in the library during lunch instead of “kicking it on the corner with the homies,” and eventually he turned straight Fs into a 3.0 GPA. Last semester, Buena High School named him most improved senior. Last month, he was chosen to attend an educational trip to Wall Street.

The UCSB grant will help fund similar camps and retreats that have proven to be effective, said Gilbert Cuevas, founding director of Oxnard’s Future Leaders of America.

“That organization has really done it for me,” Miguel said. “Sometimes I wake up and can’t believe everything I have going for me.”

But despite his recent academic success, Miguel still has an overall GPA too low to qualify him for entrance into a UC or Cal State school. Coming from a low-income home, he is skeptical that he will ever be able to afford a university. So instead of enrolling in community college, he is debating whether to enlist in the U. S. Navy with the promise of a free education later in life.

Larry Calderon, president of Ventura College, called that a “dramatic illustration of the problem,” which he believes stems from poor communication between educational institutions and Latino families.

“It’s amazing to those of us in education, because we feel like, ‘How much more can we say and do?’ ” Calderon said. “But when you get out into these communities, you realize their world of information is extremely limited.”

Bridging those gaps is one of the main goals of the UCSB project, and the reason behind its approach to involve everyone from elementary school principals to university chancellors.

“A lot of these institutions have never communicated with each other before,” said Jaime Casillas, director of off-campus programs at Oxnard College. The college is, as part of the UCSB project, leading a push to increase access to technology among Latino families in Oxnard.

Early Encouragement

In Santa Barbara County, researchers are trying to tackle the issue by starting with sixth-graders.

One of the prospective mentors in Isla Vista is UCSB junior Erica Vazquez, 21, who grew up in Oxnard.

Despite her good grades at Hueneme High School, Vazquez said it wasn’t until she was a junior that she realized a UC school was a possibility for her. She scraped together the tuition with loans, money from a part-time job, scholarships and federal aid. When she met students at UCSB from more affluent areas--who seemed far better prepared for college at an earlier age--she truly understood the problem.

“The expectation is that a high school diploma is OK, and you think only people with money can go to a university,” she said. “There was a lack of encouragement about college, even in college-prep classes.”

Now, she said, she wants to give some of what she missed out on to the Isla Vista sixth-grader she will work with next year.

“I can really relate with these kids,” she said. “They need to know the resources that are there in the community.”