Eisner Gives College Hopes to Needy Children

Victoriano Lopez Jr. stood in the doorway of his family’s modest stucco home in Pacoima, smiling shyly at the people who had crowded into his frontyard Saturday bearing hopes for his uncertain future.

His little sisters squeezed past him onto the sagging porch to see what all the commotion was about. The children’s father, a construction worker born 45 years ago in Mexico, listened as a woman explained, in Spanish, the college scholarship earmarked for his 11-year-old son.

If Victoriano, a wide-eyed sixth-grader at San Fernando Middle School, kept up his grades, if he prepared for college and one day graduated from San Fernando High School, he could earn a $6,000 scholarship.

“My man, we’re expecting you when you’re a ninth-grader,” said Philip Saldivar, the high school principal, who had trooped into the yard with an entourage of educators and corporate sponsors. “Be a tiger, huh?”

Standing beside Saldivar on a small patch of grass flanked by a rusty blue car and a few chickens was Disney Chairman Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane. The Eisner Foundation had pledged $1 million to help launch the Los Angeles branch of Project GRAD, a public-private education partnership started six years ago in Houston.

In Los Angeles, the program is based in the struggling San Fernando cluster of the Los Angeles Unified School District. If successful, it could be expanded throughout the district.

Hampered by lagging English and math skills, only about 14% of students at San Fernando High School go on to four-year colleges, educators said. Many of the teenagers are the children of poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants, and hundreds drop out before they graduate.

Project GRAD (Graduation Really Achieves Dreams) offers scholarship money to students who meet academic requirements and gives teachers extensive training and curriculum aids such as books and computers.

The highly touted program includes math lessons that introduce algebra to elementary school students, one-on-one tutoring in reading, and counseling to prevent dropping out. Project GRAD has helped boost test scores and graduation rates in Houston and Newark, N.J.

In Los Angeles, the $40-million initiative, funded by a mix of federal grants, school district contributions and private donations like the money from the Eisner Foundation, includes 15 schools serving 25,000 children. The San Fernando cluster draws students from Arleta, Pacoima, San Fernando and Sylmar.

At a kickoff rally Saturday at San Fernando High, Eisner said: “You know, I do deal in dreams every day.”

But although Disney spins tales of fantasy, he added, “The dreams that Project GRAD creates are grounded in reality.”

After the kickoff ceremony, about 200 students and volunteers fanned out into nearby neighborhoods to knock on doors of sixth- and ninth-graders.

There, in the yards of dozens of squat bungalows, they spread the word that one day, with hard work and community support, Victoriano Lopez and hundreds like him can go to college.