Oxnard College Re-Entry Center Puts Students Back on Course : Education: Program, operating on a shoestring budget, guides and encourages people as they pursue their dreams for advancement.

Angie Garnica decided to take a big step in August: decades after dropping out of high school, she would sign up for a Spanish class at Oxnard College.

But a friend urged her to first check out the re-entry center, a comfy room at the back of the student center where older students get help easing back into school life.

“I was scared,” said the 51-year-old Garnica, a minister’s wife and grandmother of nine. “But they made me feel so at home, and they were so caring.”

Counselors at the re-entry center asked Garnica what else she wanted to do--aside from brushing up on Spanish grammar. Several hours of counseling and encouragement later, Garnica’s goals had changed from from taking a Spanish class to pursuing an office technician’s certificate to obtaining an associate of arts degree.

“I saw that everyone kept encouraging me here,” she said. “And I said, ‘Me?’ But everyone said that all you need is a plan.”

Oxnard College’s re-entry center does that to people, students say. It helps them remember their dreams. Welfare mothers have graduated to white-collar jobs. One former factory worker emerged to pursue her bachelor’s, and then her doctorate at a university.

The center does it all on a shoestring budget of $1,500, plus $2,300 for the Camarillo and Oxnard “Women’s Day” events it sponsors each year. The events feature guest speakers and booths and seminars designed to help boost women in business and interpersonal skills. The Oxnard event, which organizers expect will draw 500 to 1,000 women to the college campus, will be held Saturday.

Even in good years, the mostly volunteer staff must hold fund-raisers and bake sales to rustle up extra money. But this fall, with the district facing a severe budget crunch, the center has only been allotted enough money to pay for the women’s day events--and that came only after Ronald Jackson, the vice president for student services, intervened with the college president.

Money for supplies, mailings, copy-machine repairs and other expenses now comes from the $450 center volunteers raised at an August fund-raising dinner. When that money runs out, they say they will scramble for more.

The center has contacts with about 5,000 students and community members each year, staff members say, but it regularly serves about 100 students. The great majority are women.

“We love it when men come through, because we have so much to learn from them,” said re-entry student Laura Burwick, 32, of Port Hueneme. “But men are not as willing to reach out and say they need help as women are.”

At the heart of the effort is Priscilla Partridge de Garcia, 51, a faculty member and clinical psychologist who reduced her private practice to devote time to counseling nervous re-entry students and to running the college’s center.

“What she gives us is hope and possibility,” Burwick said. “And then once she gives us that hope, then she gives us the skills of how to do it.”

“Dr. Priscilla,” as the students call her, took a different path than they are following. She went to college straight out of high school, sailing through USC’s bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate programs with extensive scholarship aid. At age 28, she opened her own psychotherapy practice.

Then, in 1975, she accepted a job teaching assertiveness at Oxnard College. The class led her to organize support groups for the many re-entry students she was teaching. Eventually, she petitioned college officials to open a special re-entry center.

“I saw that when re-entry people come back, they have very fragile egos,” she said. “They think maybe their mind has atrophied, and they’re a little unsure of themselves.

“So I look for the best in them, and I help that part of them. I help them make baby goals, like gaining time management or eating better, and then we just keep building and building.”

De Garcia enforces strict rules at the center. No gossiping or sarcastic joking is allowed. The stereo plays only soothing classical music. Students attend seminars on how to dress and how to plan their finances. The ones who make progress are awarded the title of “angel,” and are given their own new students to counsel and encourage.

Though the women represent a wide range of ethnic and economic groups, they pull together and function as a unit, supporters say.

“Priscilla creates this incredibly supportive community,” said Nancy Gregg, owner of a janitorial supplies service in Oxnard who mentors a center student. “She makes such incredible opportunities for people.”

Student Enedina Rosales, 46, said she would probably not be in school today were it not for the encouragement she found at the re-entry center.

Frustrated staying home all day with two young children, she first signed up for English classes at Oxnard College in 1985. But her husband persuaded her to drop out at mid-semester.

“My husband thinks a wife should stay at home all the time,” said Rosales, who emigrated from Mexico 20 years ago. “He thinks before you get married you can study, but after, you stay home.”

Five years later, Rosales decided she would make another go at education, and this time, she told her husband she would take classes in office skills as well as English.

“I said to him . . . I’m not so young already, this is my last chance, and I’m not going to drop it,” she said.

Rosales needed an on-campus job to get financial aid, and she found it at the re-entry center. Friends she has made at the center encourage her when she is low and feeling overwhelmed, she said. The daunting prospect of completing a research paper nearly drove her out of school again during her first semester, she said, but other students at the center helped her through. They showed her where to get research books, what information to read and how to type her paper on a computer.

As for her husband, she said: “I tell him I love him, but I have to do this. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Rosales dreams of being a white-collar office worker. Her day begins at 4 or 5 a.m., waking up early to do her homework. Then it is off to school for most of the day, where she works, attends classes and finishes her homework. She returns home by 4 p.m., cooking meals and cleaning up after her husband and two teen-age children before going to sleep at 10 p.m.

She plans to graduate in May with an associate of science degree, she said.

About 80% of the re-entry center’s students graduate with an associate’s degree, de Garcia said, a much higher rate than the general student population.

Moorpark College has a smaller version of the re-entry center, called the women’s center, that is also run mostly by students and volunteers. Ventura College’s re-entry center closed a few years ago when its director retired, and a cluster of women faculty members have been struggling to get it reopened.

“Verbally, (the college administration) is quite committed,” said Lydia Cosentino, a Ventura College English teacher who is leading the effort to open a new center. But so far no money has been allocated. Still, they are hoping to open a new center on Nov. 1.

In preparing their case for why the school should reopen the defunct center, faculty members said they came across some surprising statistics: A survey of 1,700 students at the campus found that 59% were women, 35% were over 26 years old, and 23% had dependent children.

They also learned that since the re-entry center closed, the campus had 400 fewer female students and 93 fewer male students, said Deborah Ventura, another English teacher working on the new center.

“When campuses don’t offer specific services for women, women don’t see college as an inviting option for them,” she said. “We want to show women that Ventura College is for them.”

Part of the centers’ funding problems, advocates say, is that their budgets come out of each college’s increasingly squeezed discretionary funds, instead of through a districtwide allocation.

The Oxnard re-entry center, however, does have fans in influential places. Community college district board member Karen Boone attends the center’s fund-raising dinners and donates her old business suits to the center, for women to use on job interviews.

“It’s a wonderful thing they are doing,” said Boone, who was a re-entry student herself 12 years ago, following a divorce. “It would have been helpful for me to have that.”

Boone said she was unaware that the colleges were having trouble financing the centers. She said the board has never been approached about making a districtwide allocation.

Despite the Oxnard center’s budget problems, the students plug ahead. Mentors like Gregg, the small business owner in Oxnard; Mary Ellen Harwood, a Ventura financial planner; and Colleen Toy White, the county’s assistant district attorney, show uncertain students that women can succeed in the professional world. Examples like that of Deborah Dill--a center alumna and former factory worker now pursuing her doctorate in environmental science at a Midwestern university--prove that the center’s seeds bear fruit.

Her main objective with the students, de Garcia said, is to help them to achieve the kind of financial security most have never realized from their own earnings.

Women “have to be economically sound,” de Garcia said, “because no one else is going to take care of us and our children.

“So if they are educated enough to take care of themselves financially, well then, that’s the beginning.”