Santa Ana Pupils Look East

Santa Ana has a message for its star students: Get out of town. Out of the state, even, to some of the country’s top boarding schools, where they will have a much better chance of getting scholarships to the nation’s best colleges.

To prove their point, district officials this month invited, for the first time, recruiters from New England boarding schools to a forum to persuade parents to enroll their children in institutions thousands of miles away. It’s for the seventh- and eighth-graders’ own good, and ultimately for the good of the district, Supt. Al Mijares said.

Some public school officials in Southern California won’t let the recruiters on campus: They fear the diversity-hungry private institutions will skim the cream of their crop. After all, the schools offer full scholarships to most Santa Ana students they recruit, and pay travel costs. Plus, they send almost all their graduates to elite colleges.

It’s a track record that overshadows local districts’.

But in the Santa Ana Unified School District, the exodus wouldn’t be viewed as a brain drain. Officials say their unusual approach helps talented kids who would do better at a boarding school than in a crowded urban setting where gangs, drugs and teen pregnancy beckon--and where the number of teenagers who take college entrance tests has declined, spokeswoman Lucy Araujo-Cook said.

The district says that the students who go to prep schools and succeed will show that Spanish-speaking children from Santa Ana’s crowded schools can compete at top academic levels. An added benefit is that their success would raise the district’s national profile.

“This is about providing choice and opportunity for a large and complicated urban district,” Mijares said. “Kids come to us with different needs, and it’s incumbent upon us to meet those needs, even if we have to go outside the traditional avenues of public education.”

More than 300 parents and students turned out for a recent informational session on the prep schools, many of them in the $30,000-a-year range. Hosted by Villa Fundamental Intermediate School, a magnet campus for high-achieving students, and A Better Chance, a Boston-based nonprofit foundation, the event made it clear to parents that their children were on the verge of entering a foreign world.

Some parents shook their heads in amazement when one recruiter said that most classes have about eight students. High school classes in Santa Ana Unified have as many as 30 students.

Others scrunched their faces in confusion when another school official said that his campus had “all the regular sports,” such as sailing, lacrosse and crew.

“Does it snow?” one girl asked Julia Sabourin, assistant director of admissions at St. George’s School in Newport, R.I.

“Oh, boy, does it ever,” Sabourin responded with a giggle. Then she explained that on winter days, she likes to take the students she advises to cafes so they can sip hot cocoa while they chat about their future.

It was hard for the students to know which was stranger, sheets of snow or high school counselors who set aside time to treat you to hot chocolate.

“I’m excited and sad at the same time,” said Connie Zambrano, whose son Mario, 12, has applied. Students in Santa Ana typically apply through A Better Chance, which forwards their applications to the private schools.

‘Impressed’ With Santa Ana Students

Over the past 20 years, Santa Ana has sent a couple of dozen teenagers to private schools through the Better Chance program. Then last year, Maria Colmenares, a counselor at Villa Fundamental Intermediate, managed to place nine students.

A Better Chance placed about 50 students from Southern California in 2000, meaning almost one in five of them came from the relatively small Santa Ana district.

“I am overwhelmed and impressed with Santa Ana,” said Michael W. Anderson, senior program officer for A Better Chance. “Within Southern California, Santa Ana is the only district that has really formally and publicly endorsed the program.”

This year, Colmenares thinks more than 50 students will apply, and she hopes that a least a dozen will go.

Connie Zambrano hopes Mario will be one of them. “It opens up his horizons,” she said.

Neither Zambrano nor her husband, Mario Sr., attended college. But they have no doubt their son will; he’s a straight-A student who has shown prowess on the football team and has a sweet, shy smile. He wants to be a doctor, like the man at the clinic who recently treated his injured finger.

“He told me, ‘Mom, your dreams will come true when I’m a doctor,’ ” said Connie Zambrano, her eyes glistening. “He wants to provide for our family what we couldn’t provide. And he wants to help the community.”

Her son nodded.

“I would miss my family, but I could call my parents every day,” he said. “If it’s going to help my future, I’m all for it.”

Santa Ana district officials didn’t always approve of the prep school idea. Colmenares, who has been pushing prep schools for 20 years, remembers when her bosses ordered her not to encourage students to apply.

That all changed after Mijares took over as superintendent in 1995 and started unconventional programs to help students achieve. Last year, Colmenares was honored by the school board for her efforts to get students into prep schools.

Officials hope that ultimately many of the East Coast-educated children will return to Santa Ana and contribute to the community what they’ve gained.

Karla Alcala, one of the first students Colmenares placed at a boarding school, did just that: She graduated from Stanford and now teaches at Sierra Intermediate School.

“One of the trade-offs is giving up roots, or knowing you won’t be able to set them,” said Alcala, who attended the Lawrenceville School near Princeton, N.J.

But that was more than offset by the wonderful friends, the superb education and the thrill of zipping into New York City to see a play or visit a museum on weekends, she said.

While private school officials applaud Santa Ana’s program, they caution that urban kids face huge challenges, from calculus to major culture shock, when they board the planes taking them from the barrio to the dorm.

“It takes [some of] them a lot longer to get adjusted,” said James Hamilton, director of financial aid at the Brooks School in North Andover, Mass.

It was the fear of all that could go wrong that first struck Erica Gonzalez’s parents when the ambitious eighth-grader came home last fall, chattering about wide, green lawns and ivy-covered buildings.

“My husband said, ‘No no no, she’s going nowhere,’ ” said Martha Gonzalez. Not only would they miss their eldest child desperately, but they feared that other students would look down on her and taunt her, and that her parents, 3,000 miles away, would be unable to stop it.

But Erica begged them. She wrote her father a letter: “Please, please, let me become someone.”

Her father finally agreed to accept the Lawrenceville School’s invitation to fly the family out, all expenses paid, to look at the school. They were met at the airport by a limousine, said Martha Gonzalez. Erica’s father was amazed at the beauty of the campus, and by the kindness of the other students and their parents.

“Even though they have money, they’re nice,” Martha Gonzalez said.

So on Sept. 4, off Erica went. “The first week I was here, I was very depressed,” she said on the phone from her dorm room. “I didn’t feel like I fit in, and I couldn’t get the straight 4.0 [grade-point average] that I was used to.”

But she has since settled in nicely, she said, joining the crew team and making friends.

“This is a Cinderella story for our local students,” Colmenares said. “From here, they will all go to Ivy League colleges or Stanford University.”