Mentoring Program Struggles for Funding

It’s been recognized as one of the best government programs in the country by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and it is becoming a model for educational efforts nationwide.

But leaders of the 19-year-old Puente Project, a California mentoring program focusing on Latino community college and high school students, say they are still fighting for appreciation in their own backyard.

Earlier this year, Puente’s advocates were surprised and disappointed when Gov. Gray Davis vetoed new funds to expand the program to a majority of the state’s community colleges.

The program “has had astounding results,” said Patricia McGrath, Puente’s executive co-director and co-founder. “I find [the veto] amazing.”

Davis supports Puente’s efforts, but said funds to expand them should come from other sources, such as the Partnership for Excellence program, for which he has approved a multimillion-dollar pot of new discretionary funds, a spokeswoman said.

But Puente leaders doubt that they will see any Partnership for Excellence money because of the intense competition. At a cost of about $749 per student per year, Puente is a relatively expensive program and unlikely to appeal to college presidents bent on spreading the new funds across as many functions as possible, McGrath said.

So for this year, Puente’s expansion plans are effectively on hold. Among the 37 colleges left in the lurch is Los Angeles Mission College--a Sylmar institution with a mostly Latino enrollment--which was about to launch a Puente program.

Before the veto, Puente had been on a roll: It had attracted support from major philanthropic foundations and the University of California as part of its new outreach efforts, and had recently expanded into high schools.

And last year, Puente received the Innovations in American Government award, one of 10 winners among 1,400 government programs competing. The award is funded by the Ford Foundation and administered by the Kennedy school, which carefully screens applicants and appoints scholars to evaluate their programs.

The award brought Puente national recognition. Efforts to replicate the program are underway in several states, including Arizona and Texas, said Felix Galaviz, executive co-director.

Puente was founded by Galaviz, a community college counselor, and McGrath, an English teacher, in 1981. It still contains the basic elements of its first incarnation: writing instruction, mentoring and academic counseling for struggling students.

Although the program’s focus is on Latinos, there are no restrictions on participation, and nearly 10% of its students are from other ethnic groups.

Building a Bridge to Universities

There is nothing revolutionary about Puente: Boiled down to its basics, the program simply encourages, cajoles and prods tentative and under-prepared students into higher academic achievement.

Puente is Spanish for “bridge,” and the program is designed to be a bridge to universities.

The 38 community colleges with Puente programs run them in the same way: Participants, all of whom must score below college-freshman level on English placement tests, are grouped in a remedial English course that emphasizes writing skills. They then advance as a group into their first college-level English course.

Along the way, an academic counselor assigned to the class works intensely with each student to plan his or her academic path and deal with academic weaknesses.

Volunteer mentors--usually local Latino professionals--are incorporated into class assignments.

“They set really high standards for you, and then, if you really want to do it, they guide you through it,” said Alma Olmos, an 18-year-old Puente student at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, in summing up the program.

Her parents came from Mexico and have made their living here working in factories and “cleaning rich people’s houses,” she said. She signed up for Puente because she wants to be the first in her family to earn a college degree and dreams of someday going to medical school.

A quiet young woman with an air of uncertainty, Olmos was visibly rattled when her instructor asked her to read aloud an essay she had written in a recent Puente class.

The piece dealt with the hidden feelings of loss and exile that seem to have accompanied her parents’ rising fortunes as immigrants. Although Olmos said she didn’t think it was very good, her reading stunned the class into silence and left one student in tears.

After instructor Donovan Gaytan weighed in with praise and suggestions, Olmos seemed to leave with greater confidence.

This combination of academic rigor, cultural intimacy, confidence-building and peer contact seems to produce better students, supporters say, although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how.

Instead, supporters point to independent study results showing that students in high school Puente programs were twice as likely to enroll in four-year colleges as comparable students who were not in Puente. Community colleges with Puente programs transferred 44% more students to the University of California than comparable colleges without Puente.

Commenting on the governor’s veto, McGrath offered a biblical quotation: “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.”

Such strong feelings about the program are justified, said Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley who evaluated the program for the Innovations award. Puente, he said, “is an opportunity to make a very, very high-payoff investment.”

That’s because, he said, the program has shown measurable results in healing one of the most troubling wounds in education: the loss of Latino students from the upper rungs of that system.

California’s Latinos have among the highest high school dropout rates of any ethnic group, and among the lowest rates of overall educational attainment.

Some scholars point to encouraging signs of Latino economic advancement along alternative paths. But the growing statistical importance of a college degree in predicting individual prosperity, combined with the large size of this state’s Latino population, has many educators and researchers worried.

The State’s Future Is Seen as the Prize

To O’Hare, for example, the success of Latinos in college is a key to the state’s future economic success.

“This is the only game in town,” he said. “Puente is directed at what may be the most important issue for California for the next 20 to 30 years: How do we get the most value we can out of intelligence, energy, hearts and minds of minority populations?”

As things stand, he added, “the waste is terrible.”

However, O’Hare stopped short of a blanket criticism of Davis’ veto, given that the governor identified another pool of money through which colleges may fund the program.

Delegating the responsibility for supporting effective programs such as Puente to local districts is a sound approach to government, he said.

And despite Puente’s purported success, the program has a drawback: It reaches only a tiny portion of the 246,000 Latino students in California community colleges at any given time. Just 8,284 students have been served in the program’s history.

Leaders acknowledge that in the long run, the governor’s veto of its immediate expansion may prove less important than the adoption of its ideas on a mass scale throughout the college system.

Already, other states and colleges are working to institutionalize Puente’s principles by tying counseling to instruction and helping students form peer-support groups.

It remains to be seen how much colleges will invest in such efforts. But veto or no, Puente has the potential to transform how colleges approach retention, McGrath said. “The model makes sense for every student,” she said.