The seventh grader warily opened the envelope that arrived in the mail addressed “To the Parents of Rosa Maria Manriquez.” The letter said something about summer school. “Oh my God, I’m flunking,” she thought. She had been running a not very impressive C average—somewhere around 2.5-at Calvin Simmons Middle School in Oakland. Although no one in her family set all that much stock in grades, Rosa was afraid to show the letter to her parents. She took it up to her room. She read the letter again. This time, it didn’t sound so ominous. She was being invited to a meeting about a special summer academic program for Hispanics. But she was puzzled. “I’m flunking most of my classes. Why are they inviting me?” Rosa didn’t care much about school and had no expectation of finishing high school. She’d also been hanging out with the wrong crowd-many of them gang members who were doing “really stupid things”—cutting school, fighting, “jumping people,” tagging and generally heading nowhere. Rosa finally shared the letter with her mother, and together they attended the school meeting. Whatever it was that Rosa saw that night, it changed her life. “I was excited. It was something different. I really wanted to go.”
	From then on, her schooling was an academic fairy tale. Her grades went from C’s and sinking fast in the seventh grade to straight A’s in the eighth. B’s were so rare from then on that she can remember each one-like the time she slipped to a B+ in gym because she jumped wrong in a gymnastic exercise. It was a complete transformation, and, she recalls, “everybody was shocked.” The Hispanic Academic Program that Rosa attended that summer between seventh and eighth grades has since been superseded by the Pre-Collegiate Academy, which she later attended. Both are strict college-prep programs run by the East Bay Consortium of Educational Institutions, part of the state’s California Student Opportunity and Access Program, with added funding from other state affirmative action programs, such as the Science, Mathematics and Technology Teacher Pipeline Program, and from private sources. The East Bay Consortium, or EBC, is a collaborative venture of 19 local public and independent educational institutions formed to provide intensive educational enrichment for low-income and ethnic-minority youth. The Pre-Collegiate Academy serves primarily Hispanics and African Americans. Rosa’s grades were so poor that she just barely made the cut for the Hispanic Academic Program. Her social crowd was flirting with danger. Rosa, said the program’s assistant director Monica Montenegro, “could have gone either way.” Five and a half years later, Rosa has just finished her first finals as a freshman in poli sci at the University of California at Berkeley. There are a lot of firsts these days for the 18-year-old. The other day, she was sitting in a Berkeley coffee house for the first time and sipping her first mocha bianca as she described the 180-degree turn in her life expectations. Looking around her at the student coffeehouse crowd, Rosa summed up her reaction to the changes in her life: “I can’t believe I’m here.” Small wonder. Rosa’s parents were elementary school dropouts. She is the first one in her family to complete high school, much less attend college.
	The fresh and open young woman comes from a Mexican American family with deep-rooted traditional values. They struggle financially, especially since her mother became disabled while working as a hotel housekeeper. Her mother now stays home with Rosa’s younger brothers. Both of her parents immigrated from Mexico-her mother at the age of 15, her father at 20. Her father left school to help his family by going to work. Today he is a chef in an Oakland restaurant, and Rosa says he didn’t see much reason why his oldest daughter should finish high school, since he figured she was just going to stay home eventually, do household chores and have children. But Rosa has her own ideas for her future-like law school or journalism or teaching. When she started down the path to university, Rosa realized that “I respected my mother, but I didn’t want to become her. I wanted to be myself.” She thinks that her father respects her drive to get an education, but that he can’t tell her so. “What I’ve done is prove him wrong. I think he likes that, but his machismo, his male ego, doesn’t allow him to say that. College is not in his background-it’s all new in his family.” Like immigrants from other countries in other generations, Rosa sometimes struggles to reconcile her two worlds. She stays home with her family on weekends, but her parents have seen her dorm room only when they first dropped her off in the fall. They don’t understand her new life-her surroundings in hip Berkeley, her college classes, even her daily schedule. “I’d like them to see what I experience every day, so I can talk with them about it,” she says. “I have no one in my family to get advice from-study habits or whatever.” For that, Rosa has turned to a variety of friends, mentors and advisors in special affirmative-action and enrichment programs, most recently her “big sister” in the Incentive Award Association that gave her a $24,000 scholarship to attend Cal. It was the Hispanic Academic Program that first helped Rosa bridge the gap between her lowered expectations and her incipient dreams of a different future. In that first intensive summer program after seventh grade, the teachers and tutors made learning fun for her. She was tutored by mostly minority college students, some of whom she now passes on the UC campus. The students in the Hispanic Academic Program did a lot of writing; they studied their culture and history; they talked about college and what it entails. “I was really pumped up after that summer program,” Rosa says-so pumped that she went to the seventh-grade algebra teacher she had hated (“and whom I love now”) to ask to take her course over again. The teacher pointed out that she had passed the course with a “C,” but Rosa said she really didn’t understand the material. The strong-willed girl insisted on taking the class again. This time she got 100 percent on her quizzes and an “A” in the course. It’s still a source of great pride to her. Rosa came out of that first summer program with more than academic resolve. She also realized that being part of her old aimless social crowd “was not me.” Rosa’s Cinderella story continued through the eighth grade and subsequent summers. EBC offered regular support and community-building activities, including after-school and Saturday programs for the roughly 200 PCA students. There, Rosa learned about computers and received pre-college advising and went on field trips to colleges throughout the area. Some of the students who went on those field trips had never previously ventured beyond the borders of Oakland. Rosa took special pleasure in the math and science instruction.
	There’s a heavy emphasis on math in the Pre-Collegiate Academy, says Montenegro. “Math is the gatekeeper that keeps students from attending college. If they don’t take the right math at the right time, they’re out of sequence with the university requirements.” And getting kids to college is the main goal of the program. Rosa received mentoring-often from youths who had preceded her in the program-and she attended SAT preparation classes and was offered other opportunities she could never have dreamed of. Rosa explains that courses in SAT test-taking techniques are especially important for those who grow up in households where English is not the primary language. Her parents speak Spanish at home, though Rosa often speaks to them in English or “Spanglish.” When it comes to school work, Rosa says, “We write papers in words we don’t use every day. The SATs are made for the white population. They’re used to hearing those words and analogies, and they come from better schools, with more experience in European literature and less in minority authors.” It’s a cultural imbalance that affirmative action programs like the Pre-Collegiate Academy help to rectify. After her sophomore year, EBC recommended Rosa to the nonprofit Summer Search program, which gives a boost to “at risk” youths with leadership potential, offering them experiences they would not have had otherwise. That summer Rosa went on a three-week mountaineering and white-water rafting trip in Oregon. She’d never been camping before. “I came back with a different perspective,” she says, and she began taking on student leadership positions at Fremont High School. The next year, Summer Search sent Rosa to Cornell University for six weeks of courses, allowing her to get a foretaste of the college experience. Rosa became involved in Fremont High’s celebrated Media Academy, a magnet program featuring hands-on experience in radio, television, magazine and newspaper production. In her junior year, she worked there before school, during lunch and after school, first as managing editor and also photographer for the school paper, The Green and Gold. The following year she became the paper’s editor-in-chief. She also honed her photographic skills as a volunteer at the Oakland Museum, taking pictures of urban gardens. Some of those photos were exhibited in the museum’s restaurant. Rosa relishes the memory of seeing her pictures on the wall, of getting recognition as a photographer, and then “seeing ourselves on TV” when the exhibition drew media attention. Her parents and uncle joined her at the opening. Rosa capped her unlikely high school turnaround with her selection as class speaker at graduation and the announcement of her university scholarship. Though the EBC programs are targeted at specific minorities who can most benefit from its services, assistant director Montenegro says the program will have to change its admission requirements next year because of Proposition 209. With a broader pool of applicants, the program will have to exclude some Hispanic and African American students who would previously have been enrolled. Among them will surely be other Rosa Manriquezes-seventh graders with borderline grades, dim prospects, dead-end dreams…and boundless potential.