From the Bronx to college: Mott Hall III student participates in college readiness program
By ELISABETH HULETTE

When 14-year-old Glenibel Cruz grows up, she wants to be a lawyer and a juvenile judge. As an immigrant living in a South Bronx neighborhood where most kids don’t even graduate high school, college for Glenibel is a long shot. But education officials are determined to improve Glenibel’s chances—and those of her eighth-grade classmates—by providing her with advantages more common in middle-class America.

Glenibel is one of 3,400 students in 18 District One schools participating in GEAR UP, Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. Funded by a federal grant and run by the Bronx Institute at Lehman College, GEAR UP aims to get students like Glenibel into college.

The first cohort of Bronx GEAR UP students started in 1999, when they were in 8th grade, and graduated high school in 2005. They did very well. Out of the 2,000 students who were in that program, 73 percent graduated from high school in four years—a far cry from the area’s usual graduation rate of 20 to 30 percent, said Kevin Anthony, GEAR UP’s director at Lehman College. And, he pointed out, between 45 and 50 percent of GEAR UP students went on to college.

The students in GEAR UP come from minority, low-income neighborhoods in the South Bronx. For many, college was never their dream; from where they view the world, with tremendous economic hurdles and a lack of educational preparation, college seemed impossible.

That’s why GEAR UP takes students on field trips to colleges, presents career panels and organizes discussions with former Bronx students who are now in college. It coaches students on how to apply for high school, and later, for college. It provides PSAT, SAT and ACT prep courses and lessons on using the latest computer programs. It even pulls parents into the program, offering workshops on college financial aid.

Getting GEAR UP students to want to go to college takes time, Anthony said. “We always mention college, but the light bulb doesn’t go on until later,” he said. “It’s something that will go on after we hit them 50 times over the head.”

With GEAR UP, Glenibel has visited NYU, Columbia University and Hunter College, heard speakers talk about their professions during Saturday morning sessions and received extra tutoring for her schoolwork and preparation for the PSAT. She’s certainly on the college track now. Although she’s just in eighth grade, Glenibel and the teachers and administrators at her school, Mott Hall III, are all rooting for her to graduate on time and get accepted by a four-year college.

But Glenibel is also an immigrant, with parents who don’t speak English and a neighborhood—Morrisania in the South Bronx—where drop-out rates are high and going to college is rare.

At 14, Glenibel is a thin girl with long, straight hair that she pulls back with a barrette. The khakis she wears as part of her school uniform are too long, and the cuffs are frayed from walking on them. She’s new to America. She was born in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic; she came to New York when she was five. Her parents are now divorced. Her mother, Judith Peña, is a waitress, and her father, Andres Cruz, puts up signs for movies filmed in the city. Glenibel translates for them at home, on errands and even at GEAR UP workshops and school events, and helps take care of her five siblings. She lives with her mother.

The neighborhoods she’s lived in—Harlem, Washington Heights and now Morrisania—have some of the highest crime rates in the city, and her elementary school, P.S. 73, wasn’t a good school. Over one-third of P.S. 73’s students are English language learners, and its state test scores have leveled or dropped over the past few years, according to InsideSchools.org). Students misbehaved at the school, Glenibel remembers, and “teachers didn’t control most of the kids.”

But Glenibel’s grades were good, and when she took the state test in fourth grade, her scores were among the highest. When it came time to apply for middle school, a guidance counselor at P.S. 73 pulled Glenibel aside and advised her to apply for Mott Hall III, an accelerated school for gifted students.

“I think our kids feel pretty good about being smart, and that’s not always the case at middle schools,” said Rachael Rymer, a literacy coach at Mott Hall III who also works as the GEAR UP site coordinator at Mott Hall III.

“I’m the oldest, and my parents didn’t know much about the [high school application] process,” Glenibel said recently. If her counselor hadn’t suggested Mott Hall III, she said, she would have gone to the local middle school, M.S. 22. But she was accepted, and has been thriving under Mott Hall III’s disciplined, child-centered approach.

She has succeeded there more because of attention from teachers and GEAR UP than from help from her family, she says. “Most of the time it was me on my own doing schoolwork. It wasn’t like my parents were really there to help me,” Glenibel said. “I guess I got lucky.”

Mott Hall III’s GEAR UP program is run by Lehman College, and is one of three in the city this year. The other two are run by St. John’s University in Queens and CUNY. All seventh graders in Mott Hall III were automatically enrolled in the program when it began last year. When the students scatter to high schools across the city next year, their GEAR UP activities will be held on college campuses, and their advisers, including Rymer, will keep in touch with them through a Web site for the project and e-mail.

Since Glenibel and her peers started with GEAR UP last year, Rymer said she has seen “such a difference in terms of their expectations about their future. I see that they have high expectations for themselves.

“This program,” she said, “has given them a sense of maturity.”

Rymer was the one who got Glenibel and her two friends, Antonia and Fransheska, interested in podcasting. For the past month, as part of GEAR UP’s focus on technology education, the three girls have been going to Rymer’s book-stocked classroom on Thursday afternoons to record and edit radio interviews on Rymer’s laptop. Their first podcast is about the social Web site, MySpace.com. When it’s finished, Rymer will help the girls post it to their blog.

Glenibel has really gotten into podcasting, Rymer said. But when she spoke into the computer to narrate the story, Glenibel made a face and said she hates the sound of her own voice. She has an accent, a leftover from Spanish as her first language, and her words sometimes stop short when she’s nervous.

Rymer sometimes worries about her students: what will happen to them after they leave Mott Hall III and whether they’ll go to college. But she doesn’t worry about Glenibel.

“She’s got a strong head on her shoulders, and she’s really smart, and that helps,” Rymer said.