Luring Young Minorities to the Campus

Chris Arce watched a group of youngsters laughing and frolicking on the soccer field on the Cal State Fullerton campus, but his thoughts were temporarily on the darker sides of their lives.

“They can break the cycle of poverty,” he said. “We can help. It only takes one member of a family to get out. That’s what’s neat. You can raise their aspiration level.”

With that goal, Arce and a group of other adults and college students have set out to widen the horizons for low-income children, mostly Latinos, from the poorer sections of Santa Ana and Orange.

Calling their program “All Winners,” the adults recently took about 50 youngsters out of their neighborhoods for 2 days and into worlds that must seem far, far away to many of them: the college campus, City Hall and Anaheim Stadium.

Mixed in among the fun were low-key talks about self-esteem, the importance of education and the need to work hard to succeed.

For children who are often short of role models, those are especially important messages. With high dropout figures and low college participation--fewer than 5% of the Latino youngsters in Orange County go on to college, according to Robert Garcia, an All-Winners program leader and associate professor of physical education at Cal State Fullerton--community leaders have a tough job trying to sell higher education to Latino children.

Those aspiring to college sometimes have to fight their toughest battles within their own families. “I’ve seen it here (at Cal State) with students who are wonderful students, yet they don’t have family support,” Garcia said. “Families don’t truly understand the importance of education. It’s the imperative to get money. It’s different values and different needs. When you have someone who’s able-bodied and they’re going to school, the family is saying, ‘Gosh, they could be helping the family and they’re not.’ It’s one of those things that’s difficult to argue, because families do need to survive.”

To combat that, the All-Winners program tries to bolster the youngsters’ self-image. At one session, Arce showed the youngsters a schematic drawing, with the word Me surrounded by parents, family, friends and other people. “Each one of you has to say ‘me’ is important,” Arce said. “You’re at the age right now where you have to start thinking about ‘me.’ ”

Arce, who directs the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services project at Rancho Santiago College, stressed the need for education. “You’ve got to get a good job,” he said. “Why?”

“So we’re not flipping hamburgers,” said Raul, 12.

While Raul got a laugh with his joking remark, it also touched on one of the program’s central themes.

“The number of minority children in Orange County is growing, almost staggeringly,” Garcia said. “Yet, the number of minority students who are coming to the university and end up in management is still way down. They’re still very much the labor force. If we can bring them in and show them what college life is about, we might just spark one of the kids to look beyond the environment they’re in now.”

Part of the pitch involved letting the youngsters, most of whom were between 10 and 14 years old, talk to college students during informal sessions.

“What happens if you don’t do homework?” one youngster asked.

“How long does it take to become a computer programmer?” asked another.

“Do you have to take math?” another wanted to know.

After the college students gave their young friends the bad news about math and the need for homework, they got serious. “You’re going to have people tell you you’re not going to make it, that you’re not good enough,” said Bea Baca, a 21-year-old Cal State Fullerton junior. “You might even hear it from members of your own family. You have to let that go in one ear and out the other.”

Martha Renteria, a sophomore at Rancho Santiago, told the youngsters that she was the only one of 16 children in her family to go to college. “I watched my older brothers and sisters working for $4.25 an hour,” she said. “I don’t want to work for $4.25 an hour. I want to be a lawyer, and I know I can’t do that without an education. I just want to tell you guys to go for it, because you can do it.”

Although the adult and student leaders talked privately about wanting to steer the youngsters away from drugs and gang activity--which are constant threats in their neighborhoods--they did not take the hard-sell approach on those topics at the camp.

Conrad Diaz, a 28-year-old Cal State Fullerton student and a member of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity that lent several members to the camp, said that approach would not work.

“If we go out and preach to them, they’re not going to listen to us,” said Diaz, who grew up in Orange. “These kids are pretty smart. If you’re a little kid that comes from an area where you’re exposed to gangs and drugs, and then someone comes up that you don’t know and starts preaching to you, are you really going to listen to them?”

The Saturday-Monday program was the third camp set up by the All-Winners group, a nonprofit local organization headed by former National Football League great Tom Fears. The camps have averaged between 40 and 50 students, Arce said, selected for participation by leaders at local community centers.

Knowing they only have direct access to the youngsters for 2 days, the group leaders have no illusions about immediate success. “There’s no way we’re going to change their minds about things over a weekend,” Diaz said. “But maybe they’ll come again next year or 2 years from now, and it’ll leave an impression. If it can help them, great. If not, at least we can say we tried.”