Thinking Higher : Cecilia Blanks

	Community college student and mother-of-four Cecelia Blanks went to workshop after workshop at the Black Women’s Leadership Conference. She listened to doctors, lawyers, educators and business people describe how they once had been single mothers on welfare, as Blanks was; how they used to collect cans and bottles to finance their education; how they had worked themselves into four-year colleges and then into the professions. During the presentations, Blanks, whose highest aspiration had been to get an accounting certificate and at least make some money at tax time to support her children, recalls saying to herself: “Hey, I can do that!” Blanks was at the Los Angeles conference courtesy of Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS), an affirmative action program designed to help students like her survive academically and financially in community college and to raise their sights to four-year institutions. It sure worked for Blanks, who went on to get both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She now teaches college courses and counsels students like herself in the very program that turned her life around at Mira Costa Community College in Oceanside.
	For a long time now, Cecelia Blanks has been surpassing expectations-including her own, which she picked up from teachers who told her she might as well forget about pursuing her dreams because she’d never be capable of achieving them. At high school in Galveston, Texas, Blanks’ interest in college was dismissed out of hand. She was steered into vocational courses and never informed of the course requirements necessary for college entrance. She recalls a typical conversation during her senior year: “I went and talked to my counselor, and then the counselor said, ‘Oh you’ll never be able to do that. You can’t do this. You wouldn’t be able to test high enough. You know you have to take the SATs, and you couldn’t do that.’” Her parents pushed her to succeed, she said, but neither of them had any experience in college preparation. Her mother, a ship welder, had ended her academic career with high school graduation. Her father, a “mechanic-slash-waiter-slash-anything else,” had only a 10th grade education. But they were a hard-working couple, often holding two or three jobs at a time, and Blanks picked up their determination to better themselves. After high school, Blanks started computing classes at a local community college. But when she got married and had her second child, her grades slipped. She and her husband moved to Oceanside, Calif., to join his family. She had other children over the years and is now the mother of six, from 2 to 18 years old. When she was divorced, Blanks was left alone with her children in a new state, without many contacts and without a trade. During an interview in her toy- and bicycle-filled apartment in San Marcos-with children coming in periodically for “lap time” or a few calm words of encouragement-Blanks described her tenacious struggle to make a place for herself in the working world. After splitting from her husband, Blanks was on public assistance. With rent bills $100 a month higher than her aid payments, she began doing odd jobs, mostly housekeeping, to close the gap. “But that wasn’t enough to take care of my family,” she says. She tried to get by next with minimum-wage Christmas sales jobs, but “every dollar I made went to child care.” She sought out various government job training programs, learning how to write resumes, to fill out applications, to do interviews. She took classes in data entry and raised her typing speed. She honed her computer skills. “But I couldn’t get a job. Nobody would give me one. I put in all kinds of letters. I called people.…But no job panned out.” Her frustrating job search taught Blanks an important lesson: “What I found out was it wasn’t what you knew, it was who you knew.” She needed contacts in her adopted area, and she wanted more training, so she enrolled at Mira Costa. EOPS at the college smoothed the way past some of Blanks’ real-world worries. “Here I was trying to get this extra $100 for my rent, feed the kids, get back and forth to school, and EOPS was the only program that helped me.” They helped her negotiate her way through the financial aid papers. They talked to her about academic requirements and goals and assisted with class schedules. They helped clear away red tape in her AFDC and college assistance payments. And they gave her $100 toward the textbooks she could not afford. Later, the program provided tutoring and mentors. They acted as mediators if there were problems with an instructor. They referred her to other organizations for specialized assistance. And they took her to that fateful meeting of the Black Women’s Leadership Conference. Meeting all those role models on an equal footing was an epochal event for the young woman. Above all, the Leadership Conference provided her with networking opportunities she needed to fashion a career for herself.
	During her two years at Mira Costa, Blanks took a full load of courses and also began working for EOPS as a peer counselor 10 hours a week. Her own counselors had talked with her about transferring to a four-year college, but “it wasn’t registering.” After the Leadership Conference, she says, it was. She asked questions: “What is transferring? How do you do it? What is transferrable? I’m listening now.” Next stop was the new San Marcos State University. For three years she made the two-hour bus ride from her Oceanside home to the campus, and another two home at the end of the day, doing most of her homework during the commute. It required herculean feats of mothering. At night, she picked up the kids and “tried to give them a lot of attention.” Before turning in, Blanks would line up the kids’ clothes for the morning and place her book bags and the children’s bags by the front door. She arose in the morning by 4:45, “put on the kids’ clothes as they slept and dashed out the door” by 6 to make her 9 o’clock classes. With similar resourcefulness, she assembled the funds she needed to study and sustain her family from financial aid and summer jobs as a counselor. She sought out the equivalent of EOPS at San Marcos, where she got both academic assistance and another job, as a peer adviser and a liaison between her new campus and her old school. She received her B.A. in 1993 in social science, with minors in women’s studies and business administration. But rather than sit on her sheepskin, Blanks traded in her four-hour roundtrip bus ride for a six-hour roundtrip ride to San Diego State University. It was one more legacy of the EOPS program, where one of the counselors first suggested the innovative master’s program in multicultural issues. Blanks replied, “A master’s degree? You’re crazy, you know.” But he was persistent, bringing her an application that she filled out “to shut him up.” The counselor carried her application back to San Diego State, which accepted her. While at San Diego State, Blanks took classes, did sociological research on multicultural issues and in her spare time interned as a counselor with three programs at Miramar College in San Diego. She got her master of arts in education in 1994, with a focus on counseling.
	After her graduation, Blanks’ internship developed into a 10-hour-a-week job as a counselor for EOPS and related programs at Miramar, where she also teaches. But the overachieving mother of six also has a 16-hour-a-week job at Palomar College with the new CalWORKS program, providing academic and financial counseling for welfare recipients so they can get back into the working world and keep from slipping back to welfare when adversity strikes in their often precarious lives. She’s also teaching on a semester-by-semester basis at Mira Costa Community College, where she got her own AA degree. Her subject is one she’s lived as well as studied: College Success Skills. Blanks admits almost apologetically that the mix of jobs on three different campuses is not as hard as might be expected because she has a car now. Her six-hour daily bus commutes are over, allowing her to spend more time with her children. Looking back now on her academic career, she says, “I must have been crazy. But at the time I just saw that this was something I had to do, and I did it.” What EOPS and other affirmative action programs did for Blanks, she says, was to help her overcome the early training she got in inferior schools that wouldn’t accept an African American girl’s educational ambitions. “It helped me be on the same playing field as everybody else.” The key to motivating young people like herself, she says, is to provide models such as she had in college. “If African Americans can’t see themselves or see some kind of model for them, then nine times out of ten, they won’t go, they won’t be a part of it. And for me, going into EOPS, the first face that I saw was one similar to mine, so I’m going to kind of do a little investigation to see if this is where I want to be.” Throughout her student years, she also tried to give her children a new model for their own lives-a model that includes higher education. “I incorporated my kids with it,” she says, “so they can see me going to school and then they also want to go to school. So I used to take them to campus weekly, like on Saturday when I had to go to the library or the computer lab. It helped my son later on because he actually became so good on the computers that it helped him with his dyslexia.” The boy, Jacquez, 13, wants to work with computers when he’s older. Jacquez’s siblings have big plans too: JaRita, 18, wants to be a nurse. Jessica, 12, is into drama and also wants to teach. Ambitious 8-year-old JaRisa wants to be a doctor and a lawyer. John, 5, says he’s going to be a movie star (“he’s firm on that,” says his mother). Only 2-year-old Jasmin hasn’t thought out her future yet. Cecelia Blanks has further dreams too. In time, she wants to set up a company or foundation to teach women-as others taught her-how to make a better future for themselves, or, as she puts it, “how to think higher.” To help students understand their potential, Blanks has a favorite little trick that she plays on the first day of her classes. She sits quietly in a student’s chair as the students arrive for class. Then, when they’re all in the classroom, she leaves their ranks to walk to the head of the class and begin her lecture. The astonished students come to see her, and therefore themselves, in a new light. As she puts it: “I’m just like them, and I’ve been there.”