Students Get Strong Push on a Tough Path

Classrooms, like the teachers who teach in them, send a message to students. And in Lynn Santamaria’s classroom at Glendale’s Hoover High School, the message is crystal clear: Go To College. Exclamation point.

On one wall is a list of college acceptances won by this year’s crop of seniors to places such as UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Davis, USC. Pennants from Yale and Duke and other colleges hang from another wall. . Interspersed are inspirational messages, such as “”Set your goals high and rise to meet them.”

The sentiment might seem a bit corny. But only if all of the hoopla didn’t deliver a payoff.

Santamaria and Ruth Stanton-McAtee, who teaches next door, are co-coordinators of the school’s mentoring and counseling program known as AVID--which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination.

The program started in San Diego in 1980 and now operates in 1,275 middle and high schools in 21 states and 16 countries. The program’s goal is to reach out to students in the middle range of achievement, adolescents who have great potential but are not meeting it. They are B and C students whose teachers say could do much better if they were motivated and put in a group of other youngsters who cheer one another on to success.

According to AVID’s data, nearly 60% of its graduates were accepted at four-year colleges in 1999, more than twice the statewide percentage of all high schoolers. That makes it a valuable asset for the state, which is facing a class action lawsuit by the ACLU and other advocacy groups that accuse public education of doing little to prepare minority and low-income students for college.

AVID students at Hoover usually start their school day an hour earlier than others, for a period of checking homework in groups, studying and preparing college applications. For another hour, later in the day, they come together again for tutoring and to work on study skills, note taking and essay writing. Seniors conduct college-style discussions in the Socratic questioning method.

“AVID embodies the reasons I became a teacher,” said Stanton-McAtee. “If you want to inspire and support students to be the very, very best and reach their greatest potential, then AVID is the program that does that.”

To that end, they push their close-knit group of students to take college prep and advanced placement classes. Stanton-McAtee has even typed papers for harried students because, as she says, “that’s what a mom would do.”

Such aspirations might be second nature to many students whose parents went to college or who live in affluent neighborhoods. But the students served by AVID typically are the first in their families to even consider college. Many of their parents came to the U.S. from other countries, in search of greater opportunities.

AVID tries to ensure that students don’t get lost in the large, confusing, understaffed high schools that seem endemic to urban areas. Its teachers identify students as early as the 6th grade and make sure they take the classes starting in the 7th grade that will make them eligible for college six years later.

Santamaria and Stanton-McAtee light a fire under Hoover’s 215 AVID students and then keep fanning the flames.

Kritika Kapoor, 14, has felt the heat.

Last fall, in her first semester at Hoover, Kritika was struggling, even though she already was in AVID. Stanton-McAtee called her parents in for a conference. Though Kritika wasn’t happy about that, she buckled down afterward. She’s getting A’s and Bs now and, in retrospect, is grateful Stanton-McKee was there to catch her before it was too late.

“I realized she was right,” Kritika said recently, as the school year wound down. “And that’s why I want her as my teacher next year because if it happens again, she’d push me.”

Nurtured by her AVID teachers as well as her fellow students, Caroline Cortes blossomed into a confident junior who will head the program’s student governing council at Hoover next year. “I wasn’t into schoolwork or activities in junior high,” she said.

Then, Santamaria came to her middle school and invited her to join AVID. Cortes thought she’d go to a community college to become a licensed practical nurse , just like her mother. Now, she plans to attend a four-year university to study to be a registered nurse.

“If you want to get into a good college, this can help you,” Cortes said.

AVID’s strong record has fueled a rapid expansion. In 2001, 55,000 California students were enrolled in AVID programs in 865 schools. For example, in Los Angeles County, 160 middle and high schools now have AVID programs, an 82% increase in the past three years.

Recognizing the program’s effectiveness, the state turned to AVID to help it increase the number of minority high school students taking challenging advanced placement classes.

Local districts fund the AVID teachers’ salaries, and the state invested $12.3 million last year to hire coaches to continue expansion and maintain its quality.

But then, this spring, the Davis administration, facing a massive deficit in the state budget, proposed cutting AVID’s funding in half. The state legislative committee working on the budget has restored the money, but AVID’s backers still worry that Davis might cut it out again.

Mary Catherine Swanson, the San Diego teacher who started AVID, says that would be shortsighted. “We figured it out,” she said. “AVID costs about $1 per student per school day.”

If the cuts were to go through, Stanton-McAtee said, Hoover High would have to lay off tutors and turn away students.

A healthy percentage of the Latino and black students who enter the University of California or California State University come out of AVID. In San Diego County, for example, 42% of the Latino high school graduates who enroll in CSU and 20% of those who enroll in UC are AVID graduates.

At Hoover one day recently, 15-year-old Emil Bagherloo spent an hour with his fellow AVID students, poring over algebra problems. Asked where he plans to attend college, Emil quickly corrected the questioner.

“I’m not going to college, I’m going to a university,” he said, confidently.

That’s not something, however, that he talks about much around campus. If you’re a “school boy,” he said, “people make fun of you. So I keep it to myself.”

Among his peers in AVID, however, it’s not a secret. Every AVID student plans to go to a university, he said.