Students Promised Seamless Transition Through College

By Carla M. Collado
Staff Writer

The city’s top education officials gathered last Thursday at California State University, Long Beach, to announce a new partnership that will ensure that all Long Beach students have the chance to get a higher education and that starts preparing them for one as early as sixth grade.

The “Long Beach College Promise” is the latest collaboration by Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College and CSULB to guarantee that students have a seamless transition from middle school through college.

“Long Beach Unified is going to do everything in its power to ensure that you’re able to go to (Long Beach) City College, Cal State Long Beach, do whatever you want to do in life,” LBUSD Superintendent Chris Steinhauser said to the 115 Webster Elementary School fifth graders present. “But you need to make us a promise. You need to do the best you can all the time.”

The “Promise” is a 10-year commitment that will be implemented starting this fall.

One of the highlights of the plan is that — for the first time ever — LBCC will offer one semester of free tuition (starting fall 2011) to all incoming students who graduate from the LBUSD. Those students will receive free tuition either through direct aid from the LBCC Foundation, the college’s financial aid program or through Board of Governor fee waivers, LBCC President Eloy Oakley explained.

The Foundation will seek public and private support in order to raise the roughly $6 million needed to fund an endowment, he added. Oakley stressed that LBCC already has one of the greatest financial aid programs in the state, providing more than $25 million in aid to students annually.

“A big part of this (promise) is just educating parents and students that there are already resources there, they’ve just got to use them,” Oakley said.

In fact, another major part of the “Promise” involves starting college preparation and outreach efforts to students as early as sixth grade and continuing through high school graduation.

“We’ve learned a hard lesson in society the past decade, that middle schools are just as important as high schools in setting expectations about where students need to go to college and whether they should go to college or not,” CSULB President F. King Alexander said.

CSULB already partnered with the Boeing Company to design “How To Get To College” posters that shows students the steps they need to take at each grade level to fully prepare for college. Alexander said more than 200,000 of the posters have been distributed at all LBUSD high schools in English and Spanish. (Steinhauser added that the district now is working to put them up at middle schools as well.)

Alexander said that, as the university’s reputation and its applicant pools grow each year — CSULB received 61,000 applications for this fall — some prospective students are becoming worried that they might not be able to attend the university. The “Promise” guarantees that CSULB will admit students who complete the minimum college preparatory requirements or minimum community college transfer requirements, he said.

“What we want to do is let them know that no matter if those applicant pools grow to 200,000, that if they do what we ask them to do from sixth grade through high school, then they will have access to this institution and Long Beach City College,” Alexander said.

The school district’s increased efforts to inform and prepare students involve 33 new counselors hired last year to work with students in sixth through twelfth grades (thanks to the federal GEAR UP grant), Steinhauser said. Just two months ago, the LBUSD also hired several parent liaisons to work at middle schools contacting the parents of all sixth graders — so far they’ve contacted about 1,000 parents — and organizing parent workshops, he added.

In addition, earlier this month the LBUSD started a pilot program to reach out to the city’s African American church community. The district hired 15 liaisons to meet regularly with the churches and discuss ways to enhance student achievement among African American students, Steinhauser said.

Alexander emphasized that the “Promise” will not just help Long Beach students succeed in college and their careers, but also help support the city’s and state’s economies. He said the partnership is one way that the school district, city college and university are asking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legislature to show their commitments to students as well.

“Talk is cheap when it comes to schools,” Alexander said, “and schools are indeed the most important investment that any society can makeÉ. (The “Promise” is) a promise that we’re not going to let the state abandon these students.”