Showing AVID enthusiasm

Michael Miller

The spiky hair didn’t worry him. Neither did the saggy pants. Juan

Vazquez had a simple task to perform that night: to pick up at least

one college recruitment pamphlet, and be done.

It proved more difficult than he expected.

In the spring of 2003, Vazquez, then a sophomore at Newport Harbor

High School, went to College Knowledge Night at the Orange County

Fairgrounds on an assignment from his teachers. At the event,

representatives from colleges and universities sat at booths, ready

to hand out information packets to prospective students. Vazquez

hadn’t given fashion much thought before attending, and his attire

made him stick out uncomfortably amid the crowd of suits and ties.

When he approached one of the recruiters, he realized just how

much that meant.

“We had to get some pamphlets, so I went to the Harvard booth,”

recalled Vazquez, now a senior at Newport Harbor. “I asked, ‘May I

have a pamphlet?’ And [the recruiter] looked at me for a few seconds

and said, ‘No, you’re not even going to come here.’ I was so shocked,

I just walked away.”

Vazquez, in fact, went straight home, too shaken to stay for the

rest of the event. The next day at school, he told his story to a

pair of faculty members -- math teacher Scott Morlan and history

teacher Angela Newman, coordinator of Newport Harbor’s Advancement

Via Individual Determination (AVID) program. They both gave him the

same message: If you want to succeed in life, learn how to present

yourself.

“He was rather shocked,” Morlan remembered. “I think that was one

of his first experiences knowing that how you look influences how

people look at you. I advised him not to take it too much to heart,

but to learn from the experience.”

Later that day, Vazquez saw his opportunity. The school had just

posted forms for students to run for class office, and the sophomore

-- who had never run for an office before -- decided on a whim to

enter the running for junior class president.

A year later, he would become the first Latino student body

president in the 75-year history of Newport Harbor High.

FROM MICHOACAN TO MESA

Juan Vazquez’s story -- the first 16 years of it, at least -- is

similar to that of many children of immigrants.

When he entered the AVID program the summer after his eighth-grade

year, he wasn’t merely the first member of his family to make a stab

at attending college. In fact, no one in his family had graduated

from high school. His older half-brother, Tony, had dropped out of

Newport Harbor High, while his parents’ education ended with

elementary school.Neither Everardo nor Martha Vazquez spoke English

when they came to the United States from Michoacan, Mexico. Even now,

apart from the most basic phrases, they speak through interpreters.

Together, they had three sons: Juan in 1987, and his younger brothers

Ricardo and Arturo, both AVID students as well.

Before their sons grew fluent, however, language posed a

difficulty. When the Vazquezes went to Back to School Night or parent

conferences, they had to rely on bilingual friends to understand the

discussions. When the friends weren’t available, they concentrated on

visual aids.

Despite their lack of schooling, the Vazquezes instilled a

definite value in their children: don’t take education lightly. For

Juan Vazquez, the knowledge came and went. At Newport Heights

Elementary and Ensign Intermediate School, he was an unexceptional

student, making middling grades and drawing occasional suspensions.

However, when Newport Harbor representatives came to Ensign during

his eighth-grade year and spoke about the AVID program, Vazquez opted

to join it. At the time, he thought entry into one of the high

school’s college-preparatory programs -- which also include the

Franklin, Da Vinci and Magellan academies -- was mandatory. In fact,

signing up was optional, but the decision had a lasting impact.

“I didn’t really care,” he said, recalling his freshman year. “I

came to school and just said, ‘Yeah, all right, whatever.’ Then I met

Ms. Newman.”

‘A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH’

Newman first met Vazquez the summer before his freshman year, when

she interviewed him for admission to the AVID program.

He passed the interview on the basis of several things: his

spirit, his charm, and the dedication of his parents to his

education. Newman was also impressed by Vazquez’s work ethic, if not

his study habits. Over the next few years, he would have to hold jobs

to support his family. When Vazquez entered the AVID program, though,

his signs weren’t always auspicious.

Newman remembered her original diagnosis of him: “Happy kid. Likes

to joke around. Still does. A diamond in the rough, I would say.”

AVID is in its ninth year at Newport Harbor High; Newman has

overseen it for seven. The program offers college- preparatory

courses for economically disadvantaged or underachieving students,

leading them in SAT training, tutorials and career research. Newman

recently instituted a “real life project” for sophomores in which

participants leaf through the classified ads to see how easily they

can live on a high school education.For his first few months in AVID,

Vazquez said he was “like a sponge,” soaking in information and

learning about college life. But he wasn’t making A’s, and sometimes

temptation led him away from the classroom. After school, when Newman

was leading tutoring sessions, he frequently drifted to the handball

courts outside where his friends were holding tournaments.

“It was a battle to get students to see that tutoring was

important,” said Newman, who often stormed out to the handball courts

to fetch her wayward pupils.

While Newman and other teachers offered Vazquez one alternative,

his cufriends offered another. They tried to persuade him to drop out

of AVID, play handball, even join gangs. Many of them, Vazquez said,

ended up dropping out of Newport Harbor. He described them as “kids

who were destined to work at the local fast food place.”

A MODEL TO FOLLOW

Even as he made marginal grades his freshman year, however,

Vazquez met another person who inspired him to stay on track: Roger

Mendez, an AVID student and then a junior at the school.

Mendez’s history reads almost like a parallel to Vazquez. Both had

immigrant parents who never graduated from high school. Both entered

Newport Harbor with a minimum of enthusiasm for sitting in class, and

both considered tossing it all away.

Both had the same wrong type of friends. And more importantly,

both met the same right people.

“Roger started out like Juan did,” Newman said. “They both got

turned around their sophomore year. The first year is always

difficult to make the transition. The sophomore year is usually when

they start to change.”

When Mendez entered Newport Harbor in 1999, he entered AVID to

please his parents and set a good example for his younger siblings.

He didn’t live the life of a model student, though. During his

freshman year, he fell in with a gang and frequently got into

fistfights off campus.

In Mendez’s case, it was his family, as much as school faculty,

who helped to turn him around. A number of his cousins were gang

members in Santa Ana, and rather than try to lure him into their

world, they convinced him to take his own path.

“My sophomore year, I started seeing my cousins and they started

giving advice,” Mendez recalled. “They said, ‘Get out of it while you

can.’”

After the ninth grade, Mendez started putting himself through a

turnaround. He began going to church and drifted away from his former

friends. When he began taking Advanced Placement tests in his

sophomore year, they got him hooked on studies.

By the time Vazquez entered Newport Harbor, Mendez was a changed

person. Vazquez first met him a month into school, when Mendez came

to talk to the freshman AVID class.

“He just struck me as this guy who had changed his whole life,”

Vazquez said. “I might have joined a gang, might have taken that

path, but when I met him, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted.”

Today, Mendez is attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in

Daytona Beach, Fla., and planning to join the Marines. He and other

graduates still come back to Newport Harbor to speak to current AVID

students about the importance of staying with the program.

“We don’t let our AVID kids go after high school,” Newman said.

“We stay in touch.”

The persuasion works more often than not. According to Martha

Topik, who teaches the AVID senior seminar class, 26 of her 28

students are the first generation in their families to enroll in

college.

LIVING AS AN EXAMPLE

Under the tutelage of Newman, and with Mendez and other former

AVID students advising him to stay on track, Vazquez surged ahead

academically during his junior year. He kept his grades high, even

while serving as class president and working at Original Pizza in

Newport Beach.

“I became great at the time-management factor,” Vazquez said. “I

still had to work 40 hours a week.”

When Vazquez approached his senior year at Newport Harbor, though,

he saw one problem on the horizon. His junior year had been his most

productive yet, but he feared that when colleges looked at his

resume, they would raise their eyebrows at his less-than-stellar

marks in the ninth and 10th grade.

For his senior year, then, he reached for another item on the

resume: he ran for student body president, an office no Latino

student had ever held at Newport Harbor.

He won. Kelly Bourgeois, the student body advisor at Newport

Harbor who has known Vazquez the last two years, said his charisma is

what reaches other students.

“He is not afraid to totally be himself, his culture,” she said.

“He is just himself and he is not afraid to let it come out.

Everybody respects him for that. He’s just very confident in who he

is and proud of who he is.”

This fall, Vazquez plans to attend Cal State Monterey Bay and

major in math. He imagines himself as a teacher later in life.

Entering his new office last fall, the college-bound senior felt

miles removed from the spiky-haired sophomore who had gone home early

from College Knowledge Night a year and half earlier.

“You’re held higher on the ladder,” he said. “People look up to

you as an example of what you can become.”

* MICHAEL MILLER covers education and may be reached at (714)

966-4617 or by e-mail at [email protected].