Scholarships Give Students Incentive

When a San Fernando High school gangbanger threatened to derail Edgar Ibarra’s plans of academic success a few years ago, he picked up the phone and called his mentor, Mike Maddigan.

Maddigan, 33, who lives in Chatsworth and is a partner at the prestigious O’Melveny & Myers law firm in downtown Los Angeles, counseled the teen, who was then a 14-year-old ninth-grader.

“He was pretty mature about the whole thing,” said Maddigan, a litigator with the firm.

Maddigan remembers Edgar’s distressed voice that day. He was tired of the gangbanger and his friends bullying him. He wanted to know if he could transfer to another school, and he wondered how it would affect the scholarship the law firm had promised him. He also wanted to know if it would be worth it to leave the familiarity of San Fernando High for an unknown campus nearly 10 miles away.

Maddigan has been counseling Edgar--who is now 18--since the slight boy from O’Melveny Elementary School in San Fernando was selected six years ago as an O’Melveny scholar.

The O’Melveny scholarship program, founded in 1990, offers $16,000 scholarships to eight students selected by the administration at O’Melveny Elementary. Students must maintain a B average through middle and high school, and the money is paid out at a rate of $4,000 a year starting in college. Attorneys from the firm serve as mentors to the students by providing help and counseling.

“This program has given me something to look forward to,” Edgar said. “I know that I have a reward at the end.”

Maddigan helped Edgar navigate his transfer to Chatsworth High School, where he had trouble only once. That was in 11th grade, when Edgar--who received the highest grade in his physics class his senior year without ever taking notes--feared failing advanced placement English. He worried a poor grade would jeopardize his scholarship.

Once again he called Maddigan for support. Edgar worked extra hard in his other classes and was able to maintain his grade-point average--and his scholarship hopes. “That was the only black spot on [his] otherwise stellar record,” Maddigan said.

Edgar and Maddigan’s relationship spans years in which both have more or less come into their own. Maddigan made partner last year, and Edgar has grown from a boy into a man determined to find financial freedom using the head start provided by the scholarship.

He graduated from Chatsworth High last year and is a student at Mission College in Sylmar. He hopes to transfer to Cal State Northridge in two years. He also is learning to be a financial planner, working with a well-known financial planning corporation out of its San Fernando office.

“I don’t want to end up like my parents, working all the time and not being able to see their family,” said Edgar, remembering his father’s long hours working as a machine operator at an aerospace company in Chatsworth.

In Maddigan, he has seen a different view of the working world, one where hard work is rewarded with promotion.

“I’ve seen that hard work pays off,” Edgar said, referring to Maddigan’s new role as partner. “I know that if I work hard, it’ll pay off for me too.”

Maddigan--who is married and has three children, ages 7, 5 and 2--said he was confidant Edgar would make it.

“In many ways he is today just a more mature version of the kid I first met,” he said.

The two talk by telephone or meet for hamburgers. Once a year, scholars and mentors get together for outings at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Museum of Tolerance or to view a winter performance of “The Nutcracker.”

“He’s a really goal-focused person in a way that not many young people are,” Maddigan said. “He has a lot of self possession. He really knows himself and is determined to make something of himself.”

Most O’Melveny scholars attend college, according to attorney Gordy Krischer, who helped start the program 10 years ago with senior partner Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state.

The firm already was helping O’Melveny Elementary--which was named after the O’Melveny family that founded the law firm in the late 1800s--by paying for field trips and providing care baskets during the holidays. But Krischer said they wanted to do more. The then-principal suggested a scholarship program.

“She told us we could help in changing the mind set from ‘Will I go to college?’ to ‘I will go to college,’ ” he said. “Everyone feels good about this program. It’s a worthwhile thing to do.”

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