Second Chance for a Degree : College Specializes in Minority Adults

Maria Shearer didn’t graduate from high school with the rest of her class, but the 43-year-old housewife will soon have a college degree.

Antonio Santoy, a former college dropout, was about to be laid off from the Hanford nuclear plant but wasn’t worried because he was entering law school.

Both are students at Heritage College, a tiny, private school on the Yakima Indian reservation that has quietly been educating Latinos, American Indians and low-income adults since 1981.

It measures its success not in high-powered professors, famous alumni or huge endowments, but in the 340 graduates now in teaching, computer work and business in Yakima Valley.

“We have teachers in about every school district around,” said Sister Mary Rita Rohde, a Roman Catholic nun who is vice president for development at the independent, nondenominational college.

Heritage specializes in a multicultural, rural enrollment made up of people who otherwise might have skipped college.

“Native Americans and Hispanics are close to their roots,” Sister Kathleen Ross, president and founder of the school, said. “It’s difficult for them to leave their families and attend college.”

Heritage has 339 students at its main Toppenish campus and 36 at a branch in Omak. The Toppenish student body is 25% American Indian, 20% Latino, 7% black or Asian and 48% white.

The average student age is over 35. More than half have incomes below the poverty level and most receive financial aid.

“Lots of colleges would consider this population a handicap,” said Sister Ross, 47, whom local residents persuaded to establish the school.

Many of the students need extra help in everything from acquiring high school equivalency certificates to tutoring.

“When I was young it was a privilege to go to college. Only people with money could go,” said Shearer, a Latino from Granger who is a senior business major.

“Now it’s a right for everybody, young or old, to go to school, with the federal (student grants and loans) we have.”

Santoy, 33, of Grandview, is a junior majoring in computer science and planning to study law. He worked for several years as an electrician at the now-closed N Reactor at Hanford.

The campus, surrounded by hops fields, apple orchards and vineyards, is on the outskirts of Toppenish, a town of 6,500 people about 20 miles south of Yakima.

The main building is a former grade school, and the 11 1/2-acre site has seven modular buildings, an old farmhouse that housed the first classes and a few storage sheds.

There are 20 full-time teachers and staff, a full-time support staff of 12 and 35 part-time teachers. The school’s annual budget is $2.2 million, and it gets donations, such as office equipment, from an agricultural research station in Yakima and bookshelves from a Seattle law firm. The land was purchased for the school by the Lorene Petrie trust of Yakima.

Sister Ross, a Seattle native who serves on national panels for education of rural minorities, earned a doctorate in education management from Claremont College in California and was academic vice president of Ft. Wright College in Spokane.

Ft. Wright, closed in 1982, had opened a Toppenish branch at the request of the Yakima Nation, and Sister Ross was asked to keep its academic programs going. She opened Heritage in 1981 with a staff of eight and 65 students.

A quarter of the students and many of the financial contributions come from Yakima, the nearest city, but farmers, wineries, lumber companies and other local businesses have contributed, as well as large corporations such as Burlington Northern.