Helping Students Chase a Dream

Six years ago, a big downtown law firm made a promise to sixth-graders at San Fernando’s O’Melveny Elementary School: Stay in school, get good grades, and when it comes time for college, a $12,000 scholarship will be waiting. Those sixth-graders are now high school seniors ready to take the lawyers of O’Melveny & Myers up on the offer. Students for whom college was once out of reach demonstrate that dreams sometimes just need a little help.

Of the eight O’Melveny students selected back in 1990, five remain eligible for the scholarship--five students who said the program made them focus on their studies and gave them the confidence to do better. Jenny Jimenez, for instance, is the first in her family to even consider college. Adrianna Guerrero already is applying to out-of-state schools, figuring that with her grades, the scholarship and a loan or two, college is within reach.

Like Jimenez and Guerrero, many of the students who attend college on the O’Melveny program, which is the largest private scholarship in the Los Angeles Unified School District, are the first in their families to go beyond high school. Four so far have graduated from college. Nearly 20 others are enrolled in schools across the country.

These bright students demonstrate that young people are more apt to believe in themselves when someone else believes in them too. Young people are inundated with stereotypes of themselves as punks, hoodlums, unwed mothers and nihilistic whiners. If that’s how kids are seen, that’s how they will act. The O’Melveny lawyers gave kids another image of themselves and backed it up with cash and attention. It worked. There’s a lesson here.