Preparing AVID Fans of Higher Education : Schools: Program to boost college enrollment of minority and lower-income students is launched at five schools.

Thirteen-year-old Jessica Perez represents the underrepresented. Despite the fact that relatively few Latino females attend the state’s four-year universities, Jessica passionately wants to go to college.

And for the first time starting this school year, the ambitious Newbury Park eighth-grader is receiving special assistance to meet that goal, as part of a new program aimed at sending more minorities and low-income students to college.

The program, called Advancement via Individual Determination or AVID, is being launched at five intermediate and high schools in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.

Schools in the Ventura Unified, Fillmore Unified and Oxnard Union High school districts plan to implement the program sometime this year as well, Ventura County school officials said.

“I think that if we keep up this program, in the long run it is going to help us and prepare us for college,” said Jessica, one of 13 students in the program at Sequoia Intermediate School in Newbury Park.

The select group of youngsters enrolled in Jessica’s class, all average students with 2.0 to 3.0 grade-point averages, were identified by teachers as good candidates for the voluntary program. Under the program, they spend one period a day learning study skills from college tutors and are given more individualized attention in the classroom.

“It is a very structured program, working with time management (and) note-taking,” said Susan Freeman, the program’s instructor at Sequoia. “We talk about career and college opportunities.”

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Started in San Diego in 1980, the program has been recognized by the state Department of Education for substantially increasing the number of high school graduates meeting University of California requirements.

Of the 30 students in the first AVID class in San Diego, 28 went to four-year colleges. Since then, the program has spread to schools throughout California, Kentucky, Virginia, and as far away as England and Belgium.

The program has also been heralded for increasing the number of nonwhite students attending four-year colleges.

Officials in both districts said their minority populations are growing. Developing AVID is a way to help many of those students overcome cultural and economic barriers, they said.

“When you have groups of kids starting out hearing, ‘You aren’t going to make it because you’re poor or you’re black or you’re brown,’ that message is enforced,” said Leslie Crunelle, Simi Valley’s director of secondary education. “What AVID does is break that cycle.”

State statistics paint a grim picture of minority college-bound students. Of 16,473 freshman entering UC schools in 1993, 1,314 were Latino women, or about 8%, and only 897 were Latino men, or about 5%, according to a report by the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

Based on figures from the report, the percentages improve to about 13% for the number of Latino women at the Cal State University and community college systems.

“In terms of underrepresented groups, (Latinos) are a small percentage of students entering into the universities and that is what AVID is aimed at,” said Joe Mendoza, director of migrant education for Ventura County.

Starting this year, the program is being launched in the Conejo Valley Unified School District in the eighth grade at Sequoia and Redwood Intermediate Schools, and in the ninth grade at Thousand Oaks and Westlake high schools.

Programs at Los Cerritos Intermediate and Newbury Park High will begin in January.

In Simi Valley, Sequoia Junior High School enrolled 31 students in its new program. “We are very interested in watching the program,” Crunelle said. “The track record is phenomenal.”