A glimpse at possibilities
Gateway High freshmen visit UC Berkeley and find that they will have choices to make
The 130 nervous ninth-graders didn’t spend their first day of high school Friday fiddling with locker combinations or searching for classes.
Instead, the Gateway High School freshmen went to college.
The field trip to UC Berkeley is the San Francisco charter school’s annual initiation into high school for its incoming class of students, some of whom have never stepped onto a college campus, or, perhaps worse, have never pictured themselves attending one.
“We’re going to help you figure out where to go for college and (college) is going to help you figure out what to do after that,” said Gateway teacher Amanda Goldman to a group of six freshmen she’ll advise throughout the year. “It’s all about what you’re going to do next.”
Some of the more chatty students said
the trip to college didn’t take away the first-day jitters or the agony of having to wake up early for school and decide what to wear.
Yet few of the adolescents allowed themselves to show excitement or appear interested as they toured the college campus.
Even dinosaur bones outside the university’s paleontology museum failed to evoke visible emotion out of the teens.
After all, it was still the first day of high school for them.
“They’re thinking, ‘Do I look smart, do I look cool?’ ” said humanities and civics teacher Greg Grossman, smiling as he looked around at seemingly nonchalant teens.
Price of textbooks
Atrip to the bookstore, however, woke a few up and gave them one of their first lessons on college life.
Andrea Donaldson, 13, scanned the shelves and stopped in front of the textbook, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.” The price tag? $160 new. “I think that’s ridiculous,” she said. “They seem interesting, but they cost too much.”
But more than a glimpse at the life of a college student, the trip aimed to create a mind-set that school matters, even if that’s not the message the young students always get elsewhere, school officials said.
“We focus on college to a large degree to emphasize that the goal of high school is to have lots of choices,” said Sharon Olken, executive director of Gateway Public Schools, which includes a San Francisco middle school.
Gateway students come from a wide range of economic and personal backgrounds. Some were college-bound at birth. Others would be the first in their families to attend, Olken said.
About a third of the school’s enrollment is Hispanic, 12 percent African American, 20 percent white, 12 percent Asian and the rest multiple or other ethnicities. About 42 percent are from lowincome families.
Gaining ‘sense of hope’
Some are academically advanced, others well below grade level.
Spending the first day of high school at college is designed to give them a “sense of hope and the feeling that they can get where they want to go because of, and regardless of, where they came from academically and socially,” according to a description of the ninth-grade trip.
The day sets a tone that staff and school leadership seek to maintain over each student’s four years of high school.
They expect students to work hard and support those who struggle to keep up.
Sacrifice pays off
In the end, about 84 percent of students at the nontraditional public charter school graduate, according to state data, and almost 100 percent of those graduates go to college, school officials said.
Statewide, about 74 percent of high school students make it to graduation day.
The day at UC Berkeley included pizza, a scavenger hunt and time with alumni and upperclassmen.
The advice from their experienced elders?
There will be lots of homework, so work hard.
“Don’t think the sacrifice now won’t pay off later,” said Anthony Rodriguez, 23, who just graduated from UC Berkeley in international development studies.
And don’t be afraid to be a nerd. Being smart is fine at Gateway, he told the ninth-graders.
“Let your freak flag fly,” he said to giggles.
Freshman Yasmeen Elshamma was nervous when she got up Friday morning and headed to her first day of school.
By the end of the day, she declared herself “confident.” “Gateway is all about college,” she said. “They want us all to be successful in life.”