San Fernando Counselor Batting .400 in College Game

During lunch hours at San Fernando High School, the college advisement center is one of the most popular hangouts on campus.

Students breeze through to chat with counselor Charlotte Bonner or they wolf down sandwiches while preparing for upcoming college entrance exams on computers programmed with practice questions.

Throughout it all, Bonner is working. During even the most casual noontime conversations, she peppers students with questions about their futures. For Bonner, it is just another way of motivating them to go to college.

“If you say you’re interested in going to Northridge, she tells you to try for Berkeley,” said Robert Coleman, a San Fernando graduate and now a junior at Yale University. “If you tell her your folks can’t afford a private college, she hands you a scholarship application. The woman’s relentless, but that’s good because if she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here now.”

For her efforts, Bonner has gained a reputation among students, faculty and parents for being able to get just about any San Fernando High School graduate who wants to go to college enrolled in one.

She laughs off the characterization, but the percentage of San Fernando students who have gone on to college has doubled during her 10 years as the school’s college and scholarship adviser.

Just a decade ago, only 20% of San Fernando’s students continued their education after high school. Last year, 40% of San Fernando’s 500 graduates went off to college, armed with a total of $1 million in scholarships. The increase is no statistical fluke but the result of a decade of hard work. School administrators at San Fernando credit the change to Bonner’s innovative program of packaging would-be college students and to her relentless push to increase minority enrollments.

Mel Gregory, an admissions officer with the University of California, Santa Barbara calls Bonner “one of the premier college advisers in the Los Angeles area.”

Although the percentage of college-bound San Fernando High School students remains slightly lower than the percentages from other San Fernando Valley public high schools, school district officials applaud Bonner’s success. Unlike typical suburban schools, the student demographics and day-to-day campus realities at San Fernando are more akin to troubled inner-city schools, where college is more the exception than the rule, the educators explain.

Because many San Fernando students do not believe they are college material, Bonner’s impact on San Fernando High is especially strong, said Principal Bart Kricorian.

“Charlotte really does a job here,” Kricorian said. “She has made a difference.”

About 85% of San Fernando’s 2,600 students are Latino. Many of them come from poor and working-class families who may not have a high school graduate in their midst, let alone a family member with college aspirations.

Half of San Fernando’s 10th-graders drop out before they reach the 12th grade, according to school district statistics. Teen-age pregnancy and drug abuse rates at the school are so high that it is one of only three campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District to have a comprehensive campus medical clinic to combat the problems.

Joined Faculty in 1966

“I try to get the kids to think about their future and the outside world,” Bonner said. A plain-spoken, sturdily built woman who looks like the quintessential Midwestern grandmother, Bonner has taught at San Fernando for 21 years.

She joined the faculty as a health and physical education teacher in 1966 but left the classroom for the counseling staff six years later. In 1977, Bonner was appointed college and scholarship adviser.

It was as a college adviser that Bonner created her plan to identify and promote college-bound students. She calls it a way to package the teen-agers.

The program begins as soon as a student enters the 10th grade. Bonner meets with small groups for what she calls a “mental shampoo,” a can-do kind of session where she urges them to take challenging college preparatory courses.

“I tell them all they have to do is pick the college. We’ll find the scholarship money to pay for their education,” she said.

The message does not always get through. “The most frustrating part of this job is to meet a student who has the ability to go on to college, but doesn’t have the motivation,” Bonner said.

The packaging intensifies when the students reach the 11th grade. In every English class, they are directed to write an autobiography, an essay that is edited by the teacher, rewritten by the student, then edited and revised again. The compositions become the foundation of their college applications.

“The autobiography is a major part of the application for schools in the University of California system and for many scholarships,” Bonner said. “I tell students that the people who read these compositions can tell when students have written off the cuff and when they have taken time and put some effort into it.”

Next, Bonner has the students write brag sheets about themselves. She asks them to list anything that they think makes them special--their grade-point average, their extracurricular activities, and any jobs they have held.

In the first of several one-on-one interviews that occur in the 11th grade, Bonner asks the students to describe their goals. She asks them to predict what they will be doing in 10 years. She asks them whether they would be willing to move far away from home. She asks them if they would be happier attending a college with a large enrollment or a smaller one.

If the student expresses even the slightest interest in college, Bonner lines them up for tours of different campuses. Each year, dozens of San Fernando students tour UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and California State University, Northridge.

“I do this for two reasons. First, to let them know that a college campus is not that much different than the San Fernando campus,” Bonner said. “Second, I want to get them out of this neighborhood. You’d be surprised at the number of our students who haven’t ever been to CSUN.”

In their next meeting with Bonner, she asks them to give her a list of three colleges--their dream college, a college they would “kind of like to go to,” and a college likely to admit them.

Then comes a slew of standardized college entrance examinations.

In the past, many San Fernando students did not take the exams simply because testing sites were too far away or the fees, which range from $20 to $35 for each test, were too high.

Bonner solved the problem by getting San Fernando designated as a test center and by convincing the testing companies to waive the fees for students unable to pay. This year, about 150 San Fernando students will take the exams for free.

To make sure students have the highest scores possible, she encourages them to start the test-taking process in their junior year instead of waiting until they are seniors. By the time June arrives, every college-bound 11th-grader has taken the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a series of achievement tests in subjects such as biology and the American College Testing program exam.

Although the SAT is the most popular college entrance test in the nation, Bonner advises her students to take the ACT as well. She believes the ACT is “less racially biased” than the SAT.

“The ACT has four sections-- math, natural science, social studies and English. This gives a student more of a chance to show what they have learned,” Bonner said. “The SAT only has two sections, verbal and math. It is more abstract.”

By the time students enter their senior year, they need only request applications from the schools they want to attend. Bonner reads all completed applications before they are returned to the colleges.

“She knows what she’s doing,” said Robert Salazar, a San Fernando graduate who now is a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley.

Not everyone is so enamored of Bonner and her packaging program. Some college recruiters complain that there is too much of Bonner and not enough of the student’s character in some of the applications.

Bonner Called ‘Rude’

One admissions officer, who asked not to be identified because his college recruits at San Fernando, said he finds Bonner “rude and antagonistic.” He was particularly angry, he said, because Bonner publicly denounced his college’s commitment to enrolling more minority students. But Bonner makes no apologies.

“A lot of these schools wouldn’t come to San Fernando looking for students if there weren’t laws forcing them to do it,” she said. “I know it and they know it.”

Although some may dislike her methods, Bonner has turned San Fernando into a routine stop for many college recruiters. UCLA and CSUN admissions officers are at the campus every week. This year, Bonner expects recruiters from 125 other schools to come to the campus.

“In two years everybody in the nation is going to be coming to San Fernando,” said Forest Brigham, coordinator of the UCLA Advisement Office. “They’ve got some great students out there and a lot of us were slow to realize it.”

Almost every school day, Bonner receives two or three telephone calls from former San Fernando students who decided to go to work after high school graduation, but have since changed their minds. They, too, want her help.

“There’s no problem,” Bonner said with a sly smile. “I pull out their file and we start the packaging all over again.”