Weekly Oxnard Program Is Inspiring Black Youth : Education: Operation Success boosts African-American awareness. But the project faces a funding crisis.

Although Fines Stevenson said he wasn’t in danger of failing any classes at Oxnard High School last year, his grades had slipped and he didn’t feel motivated.

Then, the 16-year-old Oxnard resident enrolled in Operation Success, a program that put him into a weekly college class with 14 other black male students from Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

The Oxnard College course combined bits of sociology, psychology and African-American history to raise the students’ awareness of their positions as black men in the United States.

And, ironically, the more the young men became aware of the challenges of being a black male in America, the more inspired they became about the possibilities for their own lives, Fines and other students said.

“Being a black male in this society is bringing you down,” Fines said he learned. “So you have to work harder.”

And Fines did.

His grades improved from Cs and Ds to Bs and Cs. Now, Fines, who will be a senior in the fall, said he plans to become a nurse and eventually hopes to be working as a hospital administrator.

“Sometimes you just need something to wake you up,” the soft-spoken teen-ager said. “Sometimes you just lose your vision.

Other students and their parents reported similar improvements in the attitudes and grades of boys who participated in the program.

But the project, which included a mentor program that paired boys with successful black men, has lost its funding.

Irene Pinkard, vice president of administrative services for Oxnard College, who initiated the program, said the state did not renew the nearly $12,000 grant that paid for Operation Success during the last school year.

Attributing the grant loss to strong competition for state money, Pinkard said she is confident organizers can raise the $8,000 that will be needed in the coming school year to keep the program operating.

Pinkard said she wants to expand the program this year to include black girls. But she was inspired to start the project after learning a few years ago that the grade-point average for black male students in the Oxnard high school district averaged about 1.9, or D+.

“That’s what troubled me,” Pinkard said. “Females were not having as hard a time as the black males. Their grade-point averages in high school were a lot higher.”

She and other Operation Success organizers said they were also motivated by the overall outlook for black men in the United States, including the high number of black males in prison and the declining number enrolling in college.

Enlisting the help of the Oxnard Union High School District and the Ventura County Chapter of the Black American Political Assn. of California--which is headed by Pinkard and her husband, Oxnard City Councilman Bedford Pinkard--she launched Operation Success in February.

Organizers targeted students from the Oxnard district’s four high schools who were either falling behind in their studies or who seemed listless about their future.

To encourage the students to plan and prepare for college, they were brought to the Oxnard College campus for one class per week.

“We wanted to give them the exposure on a college campus,” she said. “It would take the anxiety away from those who have some nervousness about attending a college.”

Upon recommendations from school counselors, parents or friends, about 38 boys enrolled.

But about half the participants held after-school jobs or played on sports teams that interfered with attendance at afternoon college classes, said Michael Alexander, the youth committee chairman for the local chapter of the Black American Political Assn.

For the 21 students who did not take a college class, organizers offered workshops for both the boys and their parents on such topics as college financial aid, summer employment opportunities and job-interviewing skills, Pinkard said.

The program also sought to assign all of the boys mentors--black men who would give the students extra guidance and encouragement.

But Alexander was able to recruit only 18 mentors, a tally he hopes to improve upon next year.

He and other organizers agree that the core of Operation Success, at least during its first year, was the personal-development class at Oxnard College attended by 15 of the youths in the program.

Taught by Emma Waits, an Oxnard College counselor, and her sister, Oxnard minister Sylvia Watson, the course aimed to help the boys establish a stronger sense of identity and to set goals, Watson said.

“The idea was they become empowered to take their own destiny in their hands,” Watson said.

In one assignment, the boys kept journals of the experiences that they sometimes shared. Watson said many of the boys complained that they felt isolated and powerless at their own schools, where they were a small minority.

Of the 11,800 students in the Oxnard Union High School District, 575, or 4.9%, are black.

Just being with a group of other black youths in an activity other than sports was inspiring, some students said.

The mother of James White, a 15-year-old Port Hueneme resident who will attend Hueneme High next year, applauded the program.

“I like the chance for having him relate to other black teen-agers in a very positive setting,” she said. “He began to see some important connections between studying now for success later.”

James said the course boosted his self-confidence.

“It gave me sort of an idea of who I was,” James said. “I’m more capable than I thought I was.”