By Anna McCarthy
For anyone thinking about going to college, now is the time to begin looking seriously for funding. Or so says the Foundation Center-San Francisco spokesperson Scott Ullman, who recently presented a workshop on finding money for college at the Richmond Public Library.
But few students enrolled in the Richmond public high schools are even considering college, let alone worrying about how to pay for it.
According to School Accountability Report Cards, between Richmond, Kennedy and DeAnza High Schools, an average of 18.1 percent of last year’s graduating seniors completed the minimum course requirements to apply to the University of California or the California State University.
“The majority of kids we have here, I’m happy if they just go to class,” said Richmond High School counselor Edel Alejandre.
Some worry that counselors in the West Contra Costa County School District are too focused on just graduating students from high school.
“Unless they exhibit some type of exceptional qualities, the counselors will rarely push them to complete the requirements necessary to apply to college,” said LaKema Sams, case manager for Richmond’s YouthWORKS program, which is a free service sponsored by the city to help local teens succeed in school.
To demonstrate the importance of college to her students, Sams shows them the numbers.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau 2006 Income data, people holding a bachelor’s degree have twice the yearly income of those with high school diplomas. A 2007 report released by the College Board shows that a college graduate who enrolled at age 18 will earn enough in the first 11 years to make up his tuition and lack of income during the four years in school.
Only a little more than a quarter of Richmond residents have at least bachelor’s degree, according to the 2006 American Community Survey. And at the Sept. 27 workshop by the Foundation Center, a non-profit organization that provides help searching for financial aid, only around 25 people attended.
Sams says that she is frustrated by high school counselors who are not pushing students to get on the college track.
“These kids need a push because most of them don’t get it at home,” she said. “If you’re just going to treat them like a Social Security number and just get them out of the way, out of high school, then you’re really doing them an injustice.”
But for high school counselors, getting Richmond students into college is easier said than done.
“Eighty percent of our student body is Hispanic. Fifty percent of those students are undocumented. So the doors to a regular four-year college are somewhat closed. We get around that a little by getting them into junior colleges to take classes,” Alejandre said.
According to data from the California Department of Education, Richmond High School had 1,231 out of 1,677 Richmond High School students who identified as Latino last year. Alejandre is the only bilingual counselor there.
One hurdle is the California High School Exit Exam, a standardized test that all California students enrolled in public schools are required to pass before they can graduate. The exam, which was administered for the first time to the class of 2006, is not given in Spanish.
Alejandre says that 48 of his students last year didn’t pass the California High School Exit Exam, which is not given in Spanish, and couldn’t graduate.
Isidora Martinez-McAfee is one of few bilingual teachers at Richmond high school. She says that the exit exam is only one of many obstacles for Spanish-speaking students.
“Many students are in English as a Second Language classes, which do not count in any of the English course requirements for four-year colleges,” Martinez-McAfee said.
Information about college preparation and financial aid that is available to students is not translated into Spanish. Alejandre says that language barriers, combined with the fact that many of the students come from families who did not attend college or high school, make college applications a real challenge.
But language isn’t the only barrier.
Richmond’s high rates of violence and accompanying reputation also pose challenges for young students interested in applying to college.
Mary Ruffin works with a Richmond youth support group called Opportunity West a nonprofit teen resource center that offers help with college preparation. Last year, Ruffin tried to hold a college fair at the Nevin Community Center located in Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood. But colleges that she invited to the center refused to come.
“People look at where our center is and are like, ‘No way.’ They say safety is an issue, because this is the Iron Triangle—they see the news and figure that this is a danger zone,” Ruffin said.
This year, Ruffin will try to organize a college fair again. Her strategy is to find college staff from similar, low-income neighborhoods that might be more willing to work with students from the Iron Triangle.
“I feel like if students want to come back to the community, that a college degree will make a big difference. I tell them that there is life outside of Richmond, and that they need to go and experience it,’’ Ruffin said. “And when they come back, they will really benefit the community.”
But both Sams and Ruffin admit that their success rate for helping students get to college is mixed.
Sams says that roughly 5 percent of the students she works with will end up at college. Ruffin says most of the students she sees are just trying to survive to the age where they can apply to college.
“It seems like in our community, college is not a big factor. The push is more to finish high school, get a job, get employment,” Ruffin said.
Both say that they would like to see more city interest invested in sending students to college rather than sending them to work straight out of high school.
