Program Urges Middle Schoolers to Give It the College Try
Walking from history class at “Washington State” to library time at “Texas Tech,” eighth-grader Eduardo Segura Jr. passes inch-high ivy plants and an Ivy League pennant stapled to a stucco wall.
It’s a heady experience for a boy who before this year never seriously considered going to college.
Eduardo, 13, attends Currie Middle School in Tustin, where educators are trying to create a collegiate culture for their predominantly low-income, mostly Latino students through a sort of aesthetic osmosis.
College admissions counselors and other educators said the innovative program reflects the growing belief that outreach programs for disadvantaged youth need to start earlier than high school and touch as many students as possible.
“We need to improve the seeding ground,” said Shelley Davis, director of California’s Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, a federally funded initiative to create a college-going culture at the middle school level.
Although Currie’s program is not part of the state initiative -- colleges, teachers and the Parent Teacher Assn. have donated materials and plants -- Davis said the Tustin school is on the right track to creating a pipeline of qualified college applicants.
Currie’s “college-ification” process started with naming each classroom building after an athletic conference, then having teachers adopt a college within that organization. Several have picked their alma maters, including Washington State alumnus Scott Sodorff, the main organizer of the Currie effort.
In his social studies classroom, pennants and postcards hang alongside a poster bearing Currie’s new motto: “College is not a dream. College is a plan, and that plan starts today.”
“In schools with different demographics, the attitude is always when you go to college, not if you go to college,” Sodorff said. “Creating a college mind-set isn’t something you even need to address. Here we need to break the mold.”
After the library became the Big 12 Conference, librarian Carol Fast hung pennants from the ceiling, set beanbag mascots and school flowers on the tables and plopped a graduation cap on a 5-foot-tall stuffed toy giraffe in the corner.
A bookcase is filling with financial aid guides, college catalogs and extras, including Kansas State stickers and a children’s book about traditions at Texas A&M.;
“It expands their horizons when they see all the different schools out there,” Fast said. “It’s not that California schools aren’t great, but we don’t want our kids to feel limited by anything: geography, money, whatever.”
After Eduardo sat one day at the library’s Texas Tech table, where a Red Raider is perched next to a vase of red and black blossoms, he flipped through the school’s catalog. Now, Texas Tech has replaced UC Irvine as his school of choice.
“I’ve always been into technology, but I never thought I could afford to go anywhere too far from home,” he said. “Now I know I have options more than just the schools everyone knows about.”
About 75% of Currie’s 900 students are Latino, and about 70% -- nearly double the county average -- qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, a key indicator of poverty.
So, many of Currie’s students don’t dream as big as they should, Principal Karla Wells said.
“This is exposing me to how many choices I have,” said eighth-grader Bobbi Loera, 13, who now aspires to become a lawyer after attending Harvard. “All this information is leading me down the path I want.”
Sodorff deluged universities and athletic conferences with requests for donated pennants, catalogs, anything that could spruce up a room. So far, dozens have responded, including the Patriot League.
Mike McFarland, the league’s associate executive director for external relations, is used to people asking for media guides from his conference’s eight colleges, which include Lehigh, Colgate and Holy Cross. He said Sodorff’s request caught him off guard at first, but he sent a box of pennants and posters in the hope that some Currie students will consider schools in the Northeast.
“This is definitely an innovative program to try to get their kids to the next level,” McFarland said. “We understand the allure that comes from increasing pride in one’s school.”
Some of that new pride comes from the vegetation planted around the school to distract from the patchy paint and rusted grates over the windows.
Other new touches at Currie: Teachers wear college sweatshirts the last Friday of each month, and a short period has been added at the end of each day for students to plan their after-school time to help them focus on longer-term goals.
High school outreach programs for disadvantaged students come too late to turn children in the direction of college, Davis said.
“By ninth grade, a lot of times they’ve given up,” Davis said. “In middle school, you can still inspire them.”
Other programs directed at pockets of low-income kids who were already on the right academic track, have been gradually supplemented by approaches such as Currie’s, which try to reach an entire school.
“It’s not about getting a few students into a university’s summer program, as worthy as that is,” said David Hawkins, public policy director for the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors. “It’s about changing the mentality for every student.”
As with many educational efforts, Sodorff knows he won’t be able to see an immediate effect from the program.
“You just have to go on faith that at some point, some child is going to be affected by what you do,” he said.
