The bright mural at the entrance to College Track East Palo Alto invites high school students from the community to step inside and unlock the door to a “giant tool box.”
“We’re a resource center that helps kids who want to go to college, get into college,” says Mark Haggarty, site director for the after-school nonprofit organization for the past four years.
Its mission is “simple and straightforward: get our students successfully through high school and into college. This might sound simple, but it takes four years of daily contact and communication.”
College Track offers the tools — tutoring, preparation for the ACT college entrance test, help with homework, college counseling and internships — to enable motivated students from low-income families to overcome hurdles to graduate from high school and go on to college.
Most of the 133 students at College Track this year go to Menlo-Atherton, Woodside and Sequoia high schools and live in East Palo Alto. The group includes 10 graduates of Peninsula Bridge summer programs. Many of these students will be the first in their families to go to college.
They flourish in the friendly, positive and upbeat environment created by College Track staff and volunteers.
This year College Track and Peninsula Bridge have initiated a pilot program on Saturdays in which sophomores become peer mentors to sixth-graders from Bridge. It’s an opportunity for the sophomores to be role models for the younger students and for the sixth-graders to develop a relationship with someone they can talk to about high school.
Co-founded by Laurene Powell Jobs of Palo Alto and Carlos Watson, a CNN contributor, in 1997, College Track is a success story: One hundred percent of the seniors graduate from high school and enroll in college, says College Track staff. The students take college prep classes, perform community service, and take part in their school or community activities.
College Track started in Oakland and later set up the East Palo Alto center in a converted warehouse, replete with student art and college banners.
For more information about the programs, check collegetrack.org or call Mark Haggarty, East Palo Alto site director, at 614-4875.
— Marjorie Mader
