Extending Promise of Higher Education

Jamie Taylor, a senior at Fillmore High School, knows attending college this fall will squeeze her family’s finances.

Her mother Joyce’s paycheck from a Saugus grocery store has to stretch to cover their family of four, which includes a 16-year-old brother set to graduate next year. Her father, John, has been off work with a back injury for nearly three years.

And the money Taylor earns as a waitress on Saturdays is “just enough to keep gas in my car,” said the 18-year-old, who is also a cheerleader.

Paying for nursing classes will mean getting another job or more hours on the current one. But a new program at Ventura College, known as the Ventura Promise, should go a long way toward easing Taylor’s burden.

To encourage more teens to attend college, the Ventura College Foundation has launched a scholarship program that guarantees to pay a year of tuition and fees at its campus for high school graduates and GED holders from families with a household income up to $50,000 -- regardless of the student’s grade point average or SAT score.

The foundation’s board set aside $500,000 to pay for the program, believed to be the first of its kind in California, through 2008. Students can apply now for the summer and fall semesters.

The 21-year-old nonprofit organization estimates that a fifth of this year’s 2,700 prospective high school graduates within its service area -- Ventura, Fillmore, Ojai, Piru, Santa Paula and parts of Camarillo -- are eligible for the scholarship.

“It’s a simple idea that’s really compelling,” said Ventura College President Robin Calote. “It’s a community’s promise to its own children.”

To promote local pride, the foundation calls its pledge the Fillmore Promise or Piru Promise in those towns. It intends to seek donations from individuals and businesses in each community to create an endowment to continue the program after 2008.

The California community college system, which has hiked tuition twice in the last three years to $26 per credit hour, grants tuition waivers to students with modest family incomes, about $28,300 for a family of four. The local scholarship raises the income limit to benefit a greater number of students, officials said.

Juliana Cruz, another Fillmore High senior, intends to apply for the new scholarship even though her family may qualify for a waiver.

“One of the major reasons students drop out of school is the lack of money,” said Cruz, 18, who wants to study psychology or sociology and hopes to eventually transfer to Cal State Northridge or UC Berkeley. “I think it’s a great thing that they’re offering this to give kids the courage to go on to college.”

The program is already generating positive feedback in education circles.

“A lot of our students are accepted to the University of California, but they can’t afford it.... Community college is a great deal, but it’s still too expensive for some of our students,” said Supt. David Gomez of the Santa Paula Union High School District, who estimates that as many as 150 of his district’s seniors will qualify for the college scholarship program. “They have no excuse now not to go to college.”

Steve Blanton, executive director of the Network for California Community College Foundations, said the new financial assistance program appears to be the first of its kind among the state’s 109 community colleges.

“This is something that we’d want to keep an eye on, and if it has any success, we may want to emulate it in other parts of the state,” Blanton said.

Calote, who assumed the helm at Ventura College last July after three decades at San Bernardino Valley College, began developing a support program to ensure that more students excel at Ventura College, by providing extra tutoring.

But that idea veered in another direction once Calote learned of the Kalamazoo Promise, which benefits a middle-class Michigan town about 130 miles west of Detroit. Last November, anonymous philanthropists agreed to provide up to 100% of tuition for nearly any graduate of the city’s public high schools to attend a public college or university in the state for the next 13 years. The district had enrollment last fall of nearly 10,400 students.

Although Ventura College doesn’t have the millions of dollars committed to the Kalamazoo program, it is aided by the $800,000 in annual income generated by vendors at a weekend campus swap meet.

Paul Iannaccone, executive director of the $6-million college foundation, wants to raise $100,000 in the next year to support the promise scholarships with the goal of someday adding at least $4 million to foundation assets to keep the scholarship program funded indefinitely and perhaps expand it to a two-year program.

Ventura parent Kevin Sinclair, whose 18-year-old son, Matt, attends Foothill Technology High School across the street from the college, said this scholarship seems ideal for his family.

“We looked at USC and UCLA, but financially they’re out of reach for our family,” said Sinclair, a disabled utility company employee who also has a 15-year-old son. “This just makes a lot of sense -- it’s close to our house and we wouldn’t have to worry about room and board.”