Donations Pour In to UC Irvine Summer Program

After a cascade of donations, UC Irvine’s summer program for gifted students has enough money to take all the children who were accepted but could not afford to go.

What’s more, the program probably will have enough money for all its scholarship students next year and the year after that.

Just three weeks ago, officials from UC Irvine were telling 88 children and their teachers that there would be no financial aid this year because of a drop in corporate donations.

Individuals, companies and foundations stepped forward to fill the void after learning of the children’s plight.

Now that the UC Irvine program has had a chance to sift through the pledges, it reported the bottom line: More than $110,000 in checks and cash already has come to the program and an additional $200,000 is promised.

“Financial aid is always going to be an issue,” said Darlene Boyd, who runs UC Irvine’s Pre-College Academy. “But it won’t be as great an issue now.”

The gifts allowed 50 more children, in addition to the 88 who had applied for money, to attend--children who had been accepted but hadn’t asked for financial aid because they knew there was no money.

The program, one of only a few of its kind in the state, each year gives about 700 gifted elementary and middle-school students a week or more at UC Irvine, living in the dorms like real college students and taking weeklong classes in everything from sculpture to biology to music, at a cost of $675 a week.

“My students are just ecstatic,” said Daniel Chen, who teaches sixth grade at Holder Elementary School in Buena Park. Chen, 25, recommended eight of his students for the program after staying after school with them almost every afternoon this year, working on math and intellectual games, and supervising them as they tutored other students.

Because scholarships always have been offered in years past, Chen’s students were stunned to find out that no money was available this year.

But after a story was published in The Times, donations flooded in to the program and a trust fund that is being set up for students at Holder.

Leonard Nimoy, famous for his role as Mr. Spock on the TV show “Star Trek,” along with his wife, Susan, pledged $10,000 and promised to match some other donations. An anonymous donor in Maryland pledged $70,000 to set up a fund to help students each year. A Los Angeles donor gave money to send more than a dozen students from a gifted magnet program in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Retired couples and single mothers also pledged smaller amounts.

More than $30,000 went directly to Holder Elementary School, enough to send not only Chen’s eight students, but also more than 20 others at Holder and nearby middle schools. Money left over will be put into a trust fund.

Chen said he told the students, “If you have something you want, keep trying and anything can happen. In this case, it went above and beyond that.”