Most poor neighborhoods are too busy trying to survive to help kids prepare for college. Most people who live in such neighborhoods rarely know how to help even if they want to help. The percentage of such people with any college experience is limited by decades, perhaps centuries of any attention from America’s leadership.
This Barrio Logan College Institute (BLCI) started as a one-teacher effort working with twelve second graders. Today it has a pipeline of 200 kids. Every one of its kids that applies for college is accpeted by a four year university.
If a dozen or so foundations would step into cities like Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Jose, Omaha or thriving Hispanic-populated towns in the South with carbon copies of the Barrio Logan project, thousands of otherwise Spanish-speaking kids would be studying at the country’s best colleges and universities.
With 66 million American Hispanics, there must be millions of kids who can use this kind of help that the Barrio Logan offers. I wish they had been in business in 1958 when I was graduating from high school, the first in my family to do so. I had no idea what I was doing while applying to colleges and universities, or what it cost or how to overcome my step-father police officer who wanted me to get a job to help out the family.
“The Educational Desert is Disappearing”
By Raoul Lowery Contreras
My educational inheritance amounted to my mother’s Mexican 8th grade education, my grandfather’s eight grades in San Diego, my uncle’s drop out in 1944 from the 10th grade in San Diego. That allowed him to misrepresent his age so he could go across the Pacific to fight the Rising Sun and my drop-out - to join the Navy - stepfather from a tiny rural Texas high school so he could go fight Japanese.
While world-wide turmoil and war ground on, my life was that of a World War Two kid in a segregated city in California that was the key to war in the Pacific. School was my life when the war ended. Interestingly, I didn’t have a male teacher until the sixth grade. Women taught me to read. I loved reading.
When twelve I entered the new Horace Mann junior high campus and library. It took my breath away. The librarian told us there were more than 3,000 books in the library. I asked where the fiction books were. She showed them to me and asked if I liked fiction.
“Yes,” I answered, “I wonder if I can read them all before I leave this school. “By the way,” I asked, “who is Horace Mann?”
At seventeen,I graduated from San Diego's Hoover High as an Honor student in the College-credit Honors History Program with only 11 members of a senior class of 812 and a student body of over 3000. I was the only “minority” in the “Honors program.”
Many of the Mexican American and Black students that entered Hoover when I did did not graduate when I did. Kids could legally quit school at 16, many did; they needed work, their families money. Federal minimum wage was a dollar-an-hour.
The only person I knew who was attending college was a friend of my mother‘s and her family criticized her for not working to help the family. She worked part-time at the San Diego library on 28th Street and National Avenue, 20 blocks or so from my first school, Lowell Elementary. Every day after school I would walk to the library where she worked. She would bring me books in English to look at and read with her help. The books kept me company.
I did that for two years. 1950: we moved away from Barrio Logan to East San Diego.
Barrio Logan was overpopulated yet heavily overlooked by city politicos. Most alleys in Logan were unpaved. Industrial and commercial buildings were interspersed with residential units. Zoning punished residential homes and their owners. There was a car junkyard bordering my school. Parks were miles away. Few people had cars because none were made during the war.
Most women worked in tuna packing plants a few blocks from school. The air always smelled like fish, always. 24-7.
Logan Heights was a hellhole that ended in the eighth grade or kids turned sixteen. It isn’t any more.
My Lowell Elementary is now Perkins Elementary, named after a Black educator. In 1996, fifty years after I attended it, a man named Jimmy Rogers read California state studies that concluded that by the third grade, children either could read at grade level or not. If they didn't, studies showed that children without grade level reading in English were likely to never finish school.
Rogers decided to do something about the pending problem of millions of California Hispanic and Black children who would flood the state with men and women who could not read.
He started working with twelve 2nd graders. He and friends organized their efforts at the former Lowell Elementary, now Perkins Elementary with no money, no support -- nada. He and associates worked with those children, those children that looked and spoke like me 50 years before. Many, like me, were and are from Mexico with little or no English when they wake up on their first morning in America.
Teachers volunteered; the effort grew and continues to grow. It is now called Barrio Logan College Institute (BLCI). This school year the BLCI is helping 200 children ranging from 2nd graders to the twelfth grade that are graduating. It is now opening facilities in the cities of El Cajon and Chula Vista. In El Cajon, they are working mostly with Middle Easterners who have escaped the turmoil there and have been making their way the 12,000 miles to San Diego County where over 100,000 have settled.
Another BLCI facility is being organized in the neighboring city of Chula Vista. It is mostly Mexican American, 60%. It, however, is not a poor barrio filled with poor immigrant Mexicans. Its median income is $101,984 compared to $84,000 statewide and suffers a poverty rate of 8.78% in contrast to California’s statewide poverty of 13.2%. The BLCI students there will be from the less affluent older areas of Chula Vista. Next door, National City, for example, has a poverty rate of 14.1%.
Skeptics will criticize the program because much of its $2.5 million budget is from the federal Education Department but the local educational establishment runs in the red almost every year. Teacher layoffs are annually announced for the coming year. Without BLCI, how many kids would work their way through local middle and high schools and present themselves as applicants to some of the best colleges and universities in the world; memo to skeptics: San Diego State University offers guaranteed admission to BLCI grads, some from BLCI are accepted at UC San Diego and other UC campuses. SDSU, UC San Diego and the University of San Diego provide help by tutors to help with individual students.
The 18 part and full-time BLCI staff work at running the program by recruiting students and their families, tutoring students as individuals and teams (3rd, 4th and 5th grade students), participating in workshops for students and their parents as well as helping parents with services of various sorts that help families support their children.
Is this program working, should it continue, should it expand to other metropolitan areas with large foreign language concentrations like Spanish speaking San Diego or Arab speaking El Cajon, two California cities? How about Arab speaking neighborhoods in Michigan? Or large Spanish speaking populations in Chicago, Houston, Miami, Arizona, New York City, or Los Angeles?
BLCI has no knowledge of any organizations that do what it does anywhere; i.e. to prepare disadvantaged kids to apply and attend colleges and universities. Considering that they not only help kids, working with families makes their efforts even more supportable because nothing is worth an innocent kid making progress in education and assimilation by him or herself while his or her family struggles to move into a normal American, albeit immigrant, status.
One has to wonder why the American pantheon of foundations with billions of dollars haven’t discovered the BLCI. It's not like San Diego is an isolated community far from the rest of the U.S. in the Alaskan tundra or American Samoa - it's the eighth largest city in the U.S., the second largest in California. It's a strategic world-renowned tech center with universities that are among the best in the U.S. (San Diego State) and has one of the best universities in the world (UCSD).
Pew Research reports that Hispanic college enrollment has reached historical new highs. In 2000 1.5 million Hispanics were enrolled. In 2019, 3.8 million were enrolled. In four-year institutions specifically, in 2000 620,000 Hispanic/Latinos were enrolled and that grew to 2.4 million, a 287% increase. Overall enrollment of all during that period was 50%.
Of a 4% overall national increase in degrees, 79% are Hispanics/Latinos in recent years. That fact illuminates a total change in Hispanic predominant thinking of quit-school-and-get-a-job that was so prevalent before 1950, helped of course by social and economic pressure that didn’t favor immigrants from south of the Rio Grande.
Sociologist Thomas Sowell wrote in his book “ETHNIC AMERICA” that the single most recent advancement of a minority group in the U.S. was that of the Mexican American.
The 1920s-almost-totally-rural-agricultural-place in America of the Mexican-origin person, a person with an average 8th grade education in 1950 - that person, that group has had more advancement during the hundred years since than any other group in the U.S.
In essence, then, the recent huge increase of Hispanics/Latinos in college is a furtherance of what the United States is all about and has been since the Mayflower landed its people.
BLCI, Barrio Logan College Institute is making college attractive and achievable to 200 children today, 200 tomorrow and on-and-on. Imagine how Latino/Hispanic presence in colleges and universities throughout America would increase if similar organizations were in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, etc.
Wake up, American foundations. Millions of willing children can use your help. Use the Barrio Logan College Institute as a model of how to find willing youngsters that want and need a college education.