UCI Shows the Way

As UC Irvine prepares to open its doors for another academic year, it deserves applause for reaching out to potential students in Orange County and their parents.

This summer, the school and the Santa Ana Unified School District teamed up to invite 40 adults, most from Santa Ana and Pomona, to a two-day program on the Irvine campus.

Two days, including an overnight stay, may not seem like much, but parents said it was helpful in exposing them to the academic world.

For the Santa Ana school district, here was an opportunity to give parents information they would need to prepare their children for college. An additional benefit was that members of the group could stay in touch with each other and offer mutual assistance when it comes time to start the admissions process.

In wealthy, long-established communities, students often grow up with the expectation that they will attend college, just as their parents did. But in poorer cities like Santa Ana, the students’ test scores are lower, English often is not the primary language and parents may not have finished high school. The expectations are different.

Parents with limited incomes say they want the best for their children, including a college education, which is seen as a ticket to a better life. But it can be difficult reaching the goal if there are no role models and no one at home familiar enough with what’s required to lend support along the way. Information on financial assistance also helps.

In one class for the parents, a UC Irvine official ran down the list of college requirements. She spoke in English and Spanish to ensure that no one missed important information.

Adriana Huezo of UC Irvine told the parents that to get into college the children need three years of math, four of English and at least two years of a language other than English. That surprised some in the group. But it also should give them ammunition to use at their children’s schools, where they can see to it that the needed classes are available. It also gives them motivation to be sure their children take those subjects.

Group members were asked to draw pictures of what might help or hurt their children in getting into college. In a sad reminder of life outside academe, the obstacles included drugs, gangs, police cars and beer bottles. But lined up on the other side were pictures of churches, schools, parents and scholarships.

Santa Ana district officials said they did not target any specific groups, but because nearly all the students in Santa Ana are Latino, so were the parents. A bonus for those in the seminars was the presence of Latino students and administrators on campus.

One of the UCI administrators, Manuel Gomez, has been instrumental in forging links between the campus and local schools and community colleges. UCI has helped provide tutors for elementary students, coached high school students in taking tests for college admissions and hosted science and math academies on campus. The worthwhile goal is to get students from poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods on the track for the university.

Those programs are especially important since the UC regents ended affirmative admission policies two years ago. Gomez, a vice chancellor and the son of migrant farm workers, rightly believes the doors should be opened as wide as possible and include students from across the ethnic spectrum.

Some future UC Irvine students could come from the school’s Summer Outreach Program, which this summer took 20 Santa Ana High School students interested in science and showed them the workings of a hospital--UCI Medical Center in Orange. The students were paid $6.50 an hour to perform such tasks as filing and translating Spanish for doctors. They were required to keep journals, attend weekly lectures and shadow one of five physicians who volunteered as tutors.

Program administrators wisely had the medical center’s chaplain deliver the first lecture to the students, reminding them they literally would see life and death and explaining how people handle grief.

As the world gets more complex, education becomes more important. High school students and their parents benefit from the knowledge that public education means schools are open to all with ability. UC Irvine’s outreach programs can go far to help members of the community understand that college is within reach.