College Prep Effort Aimed at Minorities : Conejo Valley: Under the program, district students are offered tutoring and taught winning study skills.

Intermediate and high schools in Thousand Oaks will be restructured next year based on a successful program started in San Diego aimed at getting more minorities and low-income students into college.

Other school districts in Ventura County also have expressed interest in adopting the program known as Advancement via Individual Determination, said Fred Van Leuven, director of secondary education in the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Under the program, a selected group of students is offered tutoring by college students, taught winning study skills by teachers and given more individualized attention in the classroom.

Mary Catherine Swanson, a teacher who helped start the program at Clairemont High School in San Diego, said in a report that the program is intended to aid “students who were either not preparing for or not achieving at levels that would allow them entry into four-year colleges or universities.”

The report, published by the San Diego County Office of Education, said an estimated 45% of high school students are not taking college-prep courses. About 92% of students in the program enrolled in college after finishing high school, the report showed.

Ventura County School Supt. Charles Weis said the program could benefit students across the county.

“What is important about this is it has as its primary purpose helping minority students get into college,” Weis said. “We have a growing minority population in Ventura County and more kids are going to need a formal education to succeed in life.”

School officials in Simi Valley, Oxnard, Santa Paula and Oak Park have said they might pursue the program as well, Van Leuven said.

Van Leuven recently finished training in San Diego and will act temporarily as a regional coordinator of the program in Ventura County.

The county schools office next year will take over coordinating duties from Van Leuven, acting as an information clearinghouse for school districts that want to adopt the program, Weis said.

Although only students in the program will take special classes, teachers throughout secondary schools in Conejo Valley will alter their classroom methods beginning next fall, Van Leuven said.

Students will write more, even in math class, because those skills are necessary to succeed in college and at many jobs, Van Leuven said. Instead of lecturing, teachers will arrange students in small groups and challenge them to analyze information, he said.

“We want to get kids to problem-solve and think,” Van Leuven said. “It’s more active learning.”

The program was designed in 1980 by a San Diego high school teacher to encourage more minorities to pursue college. Since then, it has spread to schools across California, Kentucky and Missouri and as far away as England and Belgium.

Minorities and low-income students often have cultural barriers to pursuing college as a goal, Van Leuven said. The system can seem foreign and inaccessible to them, particularly if they have no friends or relatives who went to college, he said.

Conejo Valley schools have a growing minority population, particularly Latinos. About 80% of the 17,700 students in the district are white and 11% are Latino. The remaining 9% are Asian American, African American and other minorities.

Students in the program have grades normally considered too low for them to get into more challenging college-prep classes. But when they sign up for the program, the students commit to work hard and take the most rigorous classes that high school has to offer, Van Leuven said.

“Every student has the option of college if we have high expectations for all students,” Van Leuven said.

The heart of the program is an elective course in which students learn how to effectively take notes in class and study for tests. Teachers check to make sure the students are keeping up and taking thorough notes in their classes.

College-age tutors, preferably students who have completed the program, share information about college life in addition to helping with homework. Teachers walk the students through the maze of college applications and financial aid forms.

“We’re offering support to the kids,” Van Leuven said. “We’re saying, ‘We know you have the potential and we’re going to push you. We expect you to go to class every day, to study, to come to class prepared, to sit in the front of the class and be actively engaged.’ ”