For years, Fred Carr didn't think he would make it to college.
He did well in school, but a college education seemed unattainable given that his parents hadn't made it past high school.
Carr's mother, who works at Costco, and father, a computer technician, simply didn't have the know-how to help him navigate the path to higher education.
But then Carr heard about Eastside College Preparatory School, a private middle and high school near his home in East Palo Alto. An eighth-grader at Hillview Middle School in Menlo Park at the time, Carr decided to apply after being impressed by Eastside's close-knit community and staff of dedicated teachers.
"It was a shot," he recalled. "I came home one day and said 'I'm applying to the private school up the street.'"
Eastside offered him admission, and he enrolled. But the school didn't just give him a private high school education.
Eastside, Carr said, made going to college seem like a real possibility.
"Going to Eastside got me thinking about going to college," he said. "It helped me to believe that it was possible for someone like me ... to go to college. Before, I had no idea it was possible."
Carr, now a freshman at Loyola Marymount University in Southern California, said he sometimes still can't believe he made it.
Carr's story is a familiar one at Eastside. The small, sixth- through 12th-grade school tucked away in a residential area of East Palo Alto provides a web of rigorous academic support and college counseling to prepare its students, the vast majority of whom are first-generation college bound, to pursue a college degree. The school is funded by corporations, foundations and individuals; students pay nothing to attend. The school opened 13 years ago with just eight students, all of whom went on to college. Over the years, all graduates have entered four-year colleges and universities. It's an especially impressive statistic given that just one in 10 East Palo Alto residents older than age 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher, and less than half have completed high school, according to 2000 census figures. It doesn't happen easily though. School hours run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., although many of the 230 middle and high school students stay later or come in on weekends to get extra help from teachers. The computer lab is open until 10 p.m. on weekdays and for several hours on weekends. Many teachers give students their cell phone numbers. A little more than a tenth of the students even stay at the school in dorms Eastside opened last year to provide an additional layer of academic support. The school's college preparation program is extensive, too. Students take a three-year college prep class starting sophomore year, travel to the East Coast and Southern California on two separate trips to visit schools, and even come to school two weeks early their senior year to begin mulling over material for their college application essays. The support doesn't end once students graduate though. Eastside has a full-time alumni coordinator, April Alvarez, who checks up on graduates regularly and helps connect them to resources on their college campuses. "Our work isn't done once they've been accepted to college," Alvarez said. "Our work is done once they've graduated and are in a job that they like." The extra encouragement is especially important given that 98 percent of Eastside students are first generation college-bound, said Chris Bischof, a Stanford University graduate who founded the school and is now Eastside's principal. "Because our students are really paving the way for themselves and for their family in terms of the college application process, they need some help navigating the whole system because it can be pretty intimidating otherwise," Bischof said. And teachers constantly remind students why they're at Eastside, said Kiara Jones, who graduated last year and is now a freshman at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. "Each class and each teacher that teaches that class has that same goal and tells you that all the time," she said of the school's emphasis on college. "It gets overwhelming at times, but I know that they're doing it because they want the best for me and they want to see me succeed." "I can't remember a time when Eastside wasn't encouraging a student to do something," she added. Equally important at Eastside, though less tangible, are the skills students learn such as time management and taking the initiative. Jones found herself struggling in a biology class at Wesleyan. But having been taught at Eastside to seek help when necessary, she attended office hours and scheduled early-morning sessions with her teacher's assistant to review material. And when she found herself homesick and having trouble with time management, she made an appointment with a dean on campus to help block out a weekly schedule. Jones also created a "motivation wall" in her dorm room to remind herself of why she's in college. On the wall, she posted a list of all the people who helped her get to Wesleyan. The names range from family members to Eastside teachers and faculty to friends from East Palo Alto. But college, Jones said, is not just about her. She hopes that her college education will help her find an answer to her question of how she can reform East Palo Alto's education system to ensure that its students reach their academic potential. "I feel as though my people aren't progressing academically where they are," she said. "But I'm so willing and ready to go back into the community and find out what the problem is and speed up the process." "I can't say what it is I would do because I'm not educated right now, but hopefully, through my education," she added, "I will find the answer." Eastside's Albert Trujillo, now a freshman at University of La Verne in Southern California, said part of the reason he's going to college is to be an example to younger members of his community. The son of a house cleaner and a landscaper, he'll be the first in his family to graduate from college. The Menlo Park native, whose parents emigrated from El Salvador, has informally mentored a group of neighborhood children for the past few years in an effort to show them that "not all people my age are what people expect from our neighborhood," he said. These children, he said, some of whom have older brothers who are in jail or involved with gangs, are part of what inspired him to apply to Eastside, and later, college. "I just wanted to be able to really motivate them to succeed through education," he said. Eastside's Vanessa Ibarra, a freshman at Mt. Holyoke College in New York, hopes her education will lead her to a career with which she can support her family. The youngest of seven siblings and the daughter of Mexican immigrants, both unemployed, Ibarra is on her way to becoming her family's first college graduate. Although she's not positive about what she wants to do after college, Ibarra is thinking about becoming a school counselor or teacher. "I know that having a career will allow me to give them what they gave me when they could," said Ibarra, adding that she hopes that she will be able to help her parents go back to Mexico, which has "always been their dream." "They won't have to worry any more," she said. "I will be here for them."
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