With a little help, every teen with a dream can go a long way
For Ana Hernandez, the cheerful room with hardwood floors, exposed red brick and natural light streaming in from the windows was a peaceful space to play catch-up in the mornings. She’d do homework after a long night of cooking and caring for two younger siblings and two cousins while her dad worked in landscaping and her mom toiled in the kitchen of a local Italian restaurant.
She knew the room at Northside High School, formerly Davis, was called the Go Center. She didn’t know why. After high school, she had no plans to “go” anywhere except into the workforce to help support her family. The colorful college banners that adorned the walls were nothing more than décor.
At high schools across the nation, this is where the path to college begins and ends for many low-income students. Aroom. Some banners. A lonely shelf of guide books. Maybe a distracted staffer acting as an adviser between stints on the bus line.
And plenty of high schools across Houston didn’t even have that.
Last year was different at Northside. Aaron Bishop was there. And one morning, when Hernandez and a friend heard him over the intercom encouraging students to fill out a comprehensive state college application called Apply Texas, they went to the Go Center to see what it was about.
That was the beginning of a beautiful relationship between the counselor and the softspoken young woman with large rectangle glasses. But Bishop worked slowly to build her trust.
“In the corner, by the window, is where she would hide,” Bishop told me on a recent tour.
Bishop’s official title was college success adviser. He was one of more than two dozen the Houston Independent School District hired to provide full-time, one-on-one college counseling to thousands of high school students who weren’t getting it.
The program is funded by two grants from the Houston Endowment totaling $8.5 million, much of which the district matched dollar-for-dollar. It’s the brainchild of Rick Cruz, an
HISD administrator who, as an elementary teacher, helped start a nonprofit called EMERGE to send talented disadvantaged students to elite colleges.
Cruz brought EMERGE to HISD and then wanted to expand its methods to students interested in attending lesscompetitive schools. He wasn’t deterred when an audit found that 28 of 40 HISD high schools didn’t have a single counselor or college adviser. The recommended counselor ratio is around 250 students to 1, but Cruz says HISD was closer to 1,800 to 1.
With the grant, Cruz insisted on hiring top-notch counselors, some from local charter schools, who would take an active approach.
They wouldn’t wait for kids to wander in to newly renamed College Centers. They’d study the data — GPAs, PSAT and SAT scores — and go out and find the students. Then they’d start building real relationships.
Job is about building trust
In Bishop’s case, at Northside, he’d meet with kids and remember their names weeks later passing in the hallway. Hernandez said he’d answer her questions, then ask her a few. Not just about paperwork, but about goals, passions, and once trust was established, about family and finances.
For Hernandez, the homework room became a second home. The place where she went to fill out applications and revise essays, and then revise them again, and dream about a life her parents never imagined when they brought her to the United States illegally from Mexico at age 6.
She was a good student, in the top 10 percent, with extracurricular activities such as mariachi and swim club, but she always thought her immigration status was a barrier until Bishop helped her apply for status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Based on her interests, Bishop helped her identify a major: political science. She ended up applying to six or seven schools, even though her parents weren’t quite sure what she was up to.
“They thought I was crazy, because we didn’t have that kind of money lying around,” she said. They finally relented and said she could go to Houston Community College.
“Mr. Bishop was like ‘nuh-uh, think higher. Think higher,’ ” she said.
Eventually, she fell in love with Texas A&Mand began preparing her mother for a school three hours away. Then came April, and the financial aid package that broke her heart: only a $5,000 scholarship.
That might have been where the dream died. But Bishop pushed her to consider going out of state. As luck would have it, a colleague had just received an email about tiny Antioch College in Ohio, which was still seeking students and offering full scholarships.
“This is you,” Bishop told Her- nandez. “We have work to do.”
They worked into the summer, even as Hernandez juggled a lifeguard job at the YMCA, gathering application materials, including a video statement that Hernandez says she shot in her backyard, starting over more than 10 times. Finally, in June, the college offered her a full ride totaling more than $40,000 annually, including tuition and housing.
Mom needed answers
Her mother initially said no. But Bishop and other school officials persuaded her to meet them at the high school in July to talk it over. She had a million questions: What if her daughter was deported? What if the plane crashed? What if she needed help in the middle of the night?
Hernandez said her mother finally gave in, in part because she had said no years before to her eldest son when he got accepted to A&M. He didn’t have a dedicated counselor to lobby his mom. He’s now a bartender who talks about going back to school, but hasn’t, his sister said. Hernandez said he’s thrilled for her.
Hernandez leaves for school later this month. She’s just one of the hundreds of students Bishop has led through the process, which includes odd tasks such as helping students get required meningitis shots, book flights and preparing them for the TSA line at the airport. It’s a long-term commitment, Bishop told me, looking over at Hernandez.
“I bug her today, a year later,” he said. “It’s not just getting them to college; it’s getting them through college.”
Bishop said the job can be allconsuming, and it’s easy to get personally invested in students who have faced so many challenges but kept fighting. He and his staff proved the effort was worth it at Northside, where the percentage of students applying for college rose from 45 percent to 83 percent in one year.
“The misconception is that the kids don’t want it,” he said. “They want it. They just don’t have the information.”
‘This should be the norm’
Overall, Cruz said the program accomplished more than he’d hoped. Districtwide, students who applied to college increased from 59 percent to 82 percent. Students applying to Texas flagship universities more than doubled.
He hopes to expand the program to more campuses and to start counseling in earlier grades.
Cruz says there shouldn’t be anything novel about building relationships with students and helping them pursue higher education.
“This should be the norm,” he says, and he’s right.
It takes more than books and banners to get talented young Texans into college. Cruz, and dedicated counselors like Bishop, understand that. They’ve built a path. They deserve the support of the district and the community to keep moving kids along.