A Santa Ana Link to Eastern Prep Schools

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 you will have a much better chance of getting scholarships to the nation’s best colleges.

To prove their point, district officials this month invited recruiters from New England boarding schools to a first-ever 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 even 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 students, as well as pick up travel costs. Plus, they send almost their entire student bodies to elite colleges.

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

But in the Santa Ana Unified School District, the exodus isn’t 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 are common--and where the number of teenagers who take college entrance tests has declined, spokeswoman Lucy Araujo-Cook said.

The district says 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 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 at a recent informational session on the prep schools, which cost about $28,000 a year. Hosted by Villa Fundamental Intermediate School, a magnet campus for high-achieving students, and A Better Chance Foundation, a Boston-based nonprofit, 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 had about eight students. The average high school class in Santa Ana Unified has upward of 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 Rhode Island.

“Oh, boy, does it ever,” Sabourin responded. Then she explained that on winter days, she likes to take students to cafes so they can sip hot cocoa while they talk.

It was hard for the students to know what 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 Foundation, which forwards their applications to the private schools.

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

Overall, A Better Chance placed 50 students from Southern California, meaning 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 hopes at 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 that their son--with his perfect grades, prowess on the track team and sweet, shy smile--will.

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

“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 can remember when her bosses ordered her not to allow students to apply.

That all changed after Mijares took the district’s helm in 1995 and started unconventional programs to help students achieve. Among them is a proposal to turn kindergarten into a two-year program.

And last year, Colmenares was honored by the school board for her efforts to get students into prep schools.

Ultimately, officials hope that many of the East Coast-educated children will return to Santa Ana and make a contribution to the community.

Karla Alcala, one of the first students Colmenares placed at a boarding school, did just that: She graduated from Stanford University 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 incredible education and the thrill of zipping into New York City to see a play or visit a museum, she said.

Private school officials applaud Santa Ana’s program. But they caution that urban kids face huge challenges, from calculus to massive culture shock, when they board the planes to take them away from the barrio and into the dorm.

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 oldest 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 pleaded and begged. 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. He was amazed at the beauty of the campus, and by the kindness of the other students and their parents.

So on Sept. 4, off Erica went. “The first week I was here, I was very depressed,” she said by phone. “I didn’t feel like I fit in.”

But she’s since settled in quite nicely, she said. She’s joined the crew team and made friends.

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