Puente Program Bridges Educational Gap

When Cymbeline Ponce took a high school class in literary analysis, he was exposed to all the great writing he could ever hope to see.

But it wasn’t much help to a young Latino student who struggled through class essays and short-story assignments.

“I got a D,” he said. “I just didn’t get interested.”

That is changing, though, at El Camino College in Torrance, where Ponce and other Latino students are getting a second chance to master basic writing and grammar skills. As part of the Puente Program--named for the Spanish word for bridge--Ponce is crossing cultural barriers that seem to doom many Latino students in more traditional English classes.

Papers in this class are not merely turned in and graded. They are discussed in groups by students who later revise them and discuss them again--and then revise them a little more. Once a semester, students interview Latinos who have forged successful careers.

Writing about those, students learn more than how to write.

They learn how to make it.

“It’s made school more interesting,” said Ponce, a 19-year-old political science major. He now has his sights on a four-year college education. “It’s pushing me to achieve my goals.”

The Puente Program, offered at El Camino and nine other community colleges in California, is a relatively new but successful approach to motivating Latino students, said Ray Talavera, a counselor who helps run the 35-member class. Founded on a philosophy of encouragement and cooperation, the class is aimed at minimizing the negative reinforcement that often leaves Latino students struggling to keep pace in other classes.

“We cushion the barriers,” Talavera said. “Under this approach, we look for the positive. We try to win the confidence of the students. Later you can work with the negatives--you can say, ‘Your grammar is weak in this area,’ and it doesn’t destroy the student.”

Students are encouraged to write about Latino-oriented subjects that will hold their interest. The group discussions help them develop writing skills by talking about how their papers can be improved--and then making those improvements.

“Students read their papers twice,” instructor Sallie Brown said. “After the first reading, the others can only say what they liked about the paper. After the second reading, they ask questions about things that might have confused them--’What did you mean by that (sentence)?’ ‘How old were you then?’ ”

The class began this spring at El Camino, where the two-semester program fulfills the requirement for basic English composition. It is scheduled to be taught again this fall despite state budget cuts that have jeopardized plans for a statewide expansion of the program.

A budget proposal sponsored by state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) and approved by the Legislature would have allocated $368,000 for the training of Puente Program instructors as part of a yearly two-week workshop in Berkeley.

Those funds would have been the state’s first major commitment to the program--which now operates almost exclusively on private grants--and would have helped train enough instructors to expand the classes from 10 community colleges to 14, said Patricia McGrath, a teacher at Chabot College in Hayward who began the program as a pilot project four years ago.

But in recent budget actions, Gov. George Deukmejian deleted funding for the Puente Program, saying it duplicates other minority training programs already paid for by the state. The cuts were described as a costly blow by Torres, who said public support for the project has been so strong that he may introduce a separate funding bill early next year--just to pay for the Puente Program.

“It’s probably the most effective program we’ve ever had in reaching out to Mexican-American children and getting them into colleges and universities,” Torres said in an interview. “The success rate has been phenomenal.”

Torres’ office has received hundreds of letters endorsing the program--from students, parents and community leaders, including Deputy Mayor Grace Davis of Los Angeles, said Beth Bonbright, an aide to Torres in Sacramento.

Since 1982, more than 500 students have enrolled in the program, according to statewide reports received by Torres’ office, Bonbright said. Later evaluations of those students showed a significant increase in writing skills, grade-point averages and course-completion rates, she said. About one-fifth of the students enrolled in the initial pilot program are now reported to be attending four-year colleges, and an additional third of those students are still in school and planning to transfer to four-year programs.

Both figures are well above the average for all community college students, Latino or otherwise, Bonbright said.

“It’s clear this program benefits a certain group of community-college students . . . who heretofore have been without the right kind of guidance,” she said. “(It) needs to be expanded and maybe replicated on a grand scale.”

McGrath said she and Felix Galaviz, a Chabot College counselor, developed the program after examining why Latino students often fail in traditional English classes. They found that students were not able to relate to traditional subject matter and were discouraged by a lack of positive reinforcement. The program has been expanded year by year as more counselors and administrators have recognized its success in training and motivating students, she said.

Teachers and counselors, who work in two-person teams to run each class, attend the training workshop with the cooperation of schools that expect to run the program, McGrath said. But those schools contribute no money toward the workshops.

At El Camino College, the program is run much as it is at Cerritos College in Norwalk, another Southern California school that began the project a year earlier. Students are channeled into the program if they have difficulty with writing and grammar. Often they come from Spanish-speaking homes where English is seldom spoken or written.

At the same time, Brown said, they are screened to ensure that the students are willing. About 70 students applied to enter the class, she said. Only 38 were accepted.

“There’s no negative criticism,” Brown said of the writing assignments. “(But) I pushed these students harder than I would have a regular class. We have very high standards.”

Interviewing and writing about Latino leaders--at school or in the community--is considered an important part of the program.

Roberto Espinosa, a 21-year-old Cerritos College student who grew up in Ecuador, said he wrote about Ruth Banda, an Affirmative Action worker at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Banda is one of scores of Latino community leaders who have agreed to be a part of the program statewide, serving as role models for students who are still struggling, McGrath said.

The interview helped him see that “there are a lot of obstacles out there,” Espinosa said. “But she made it, and we can make it also.”

One of the best testimonies to the program has been its high completion rate, counselors said. Of the 31 students who began the program in its first year at Cerritos College, 26 completed the first semester and 20 made it through the full year. At El Camino, 35 of the 38 made it through the first semester, defying overall student dropout rates that often run 30% to 50% at California community colleges.

“That’s sort of a miracle,” Brown said. “In 24 years of teaching, this is probably the most success I’ve ever had with a class. It has me revved up. It’s just so satisfying.”

It has been so successful that Cerritos College student Olga Zaldivar has persuaded her brother to enroll. Although English is her second language--she speaks Spanish at home--Zaldivar was inspired enough to take a second-year English class in summer school.

The second-year English class was beyond what she needed to graduate.

“I could have taken anything else,” she said. “I could have taken Spanish.”