Students Say YES to Success : A cardiologist, determined to inspire black inner-city youths, created a program to give them role models and guidance.

Donald Ware, an African American cardiologist, wanted black inner-city youths to know that they can succeed in life. But he knew that many of the youngsters did not have role models to show them how.

So a year ago, Ware started Youth Empowered for Survival (YES), a program that teams up black students from south Los Angeles high schools with black professionals.

“We want to make that which is invisible, visible,” said Ware, 47, using his catch phrase for the program.

A major impetus for starting YES, Ware said, was the media’s reaction to the hit television sitcom “The Cosby Show” about a prosperous black couple--the husband an obstetrician and the wife a lawyer--and their family.

“They [the media] said this is unrealistic, that this doesn’t actually exist,” Ware said. “And that hurt my heart.”

What also hurt, said Ware, a graduate of Fremont High in South-Central Los Angeles, was the fact that although he had become a part of America’s growing black middle class, the young people around him were skeptical that such a future was attainable.

He held the YES program’s first event in 1995, an educational workshop at Loyola Marymount University. It grew out of his involvement with Our Author’s Study Club, a group that nearly a half-century ago pressured the city of Los Angeles to proclaim Negro History Week.

The workshop--directed at students with grade averages of A through C--drew 300 students from high schools throughout South Los Angeles. They had the opportunity to meet with 100 professionals, from doctors and lawyers to celebrities such as James Worthy of the Lakers and actress Marla Gibbs.

“We really tried to ‘wow’ them,” Ware said.

The education workshop was repeated this year, again at Loyola, drawing students from Crenshaw, Dorsey, Fremont, Jefferson, Jordan, Locke, Los Angeles, Manual Arts, Washington and Westchester high schools.

This time, the highlight was a live teleconference with retired Gen. Colin Powell, followed by group discussions with professionals ranging in fields from law and medicine to construction and mortuary science.

The seminar was followed up last week with a series of field trips in which the most enthusiastic students visited their new mentors at work.

About a dozen students were invited to Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, where Ware practices.

Four members of the group were invited to sit in on a cardiac catheterization procedure, where a thin tube is inserted in a patient’s groin and pushed through a vein or artery to the heart to measure the pressure inside. The young women dressed in hospital scrubs and lead aprons to protect themselves from the radiation used to X-ray the patient’s heart.

“I felt good,” said Kenrah Staine, 17, a senior at Manual Arts High School, after watching the hourlong procedure. She said she has always wanted to be a nurse or a doctor and was inspired by her experience in the operating room. “We got a taste of how they are,” she said.

Two other young women went to QWEST Records, composer Quincy Jones’ music and publishing company, to learn about the entertainment industry. They spent the day with Ron Carter, the publicist for the record company, who said he would like to participate as a mentor again. He said he would recruit fellow professionals in the music industry as well.

Two students flew with Anthony Paschot, a helicopter pilot in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and another group spent the day downtown with city officials.

Ware says the education workshops and the on-the-job field trips will become an annual event, and he hopes to sponsor more events that will give African American youths the confidence and know-how to succeed.

“I think it’s one of the most outstanding program for youngsters,” said Barbara Boudreaux, a member of the Los Angeles School District board. Boudreaux is mentoring two students, she said, and has promised to see them through their entire educational career.

“It lets youngsters know that outside of their immediate family and teachers, they have someone who is willing to support them and to be with them all through high school and college,” Boudreaux said.

One of Ware’s goals for the YES program is to set up a camp where students who have at least a 3.0 grade point average but score only moderately on college entrance exams can learn how to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

He envisions a camp away from the distractions of urban life where participants would spend a week learning how to take the SAT.

“These kids have been artificially kept out of the system,” Ware said, pointing out that statistics have shown that minorities score lower on such tests even when they receive good grades in school.

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THE BEAT

Today’s centerpiece is about Youth Empowered for Survival, a program started by Donald Ware, a cardiologist, that provides mentors for African American high school students. If you are interested in being involved with the YES program, call: (213) 750-5000.