The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

We began the Puente Project in 1981 at Chabot Community College in Hayward, California, where we met as colleagues­McGrath an English teacher and Galaviz a counselor and Assistant Dean. Concerned about the high dropout rate of Mexican-American/Latino students, we collaborated to design a program that employs three major components, each of which includes a community focus: matching students with mentors from the Mexican-American/Latino professional and academic community; providing intensive English instruction that focuses on writing and reading about students' cultural experiences and identity; and providing students with counselors from the Latino community who have first-hand knowledge of the challenges they face. The program mission is to help students stay in school, enroll in college, earn bachelors' and advanced degrees, and return to their communities as leaders and mentors.

The educational landscape from which Puente emerged was extremely bleak. Mexican-American and Latino students are the most educationally underserved ethnic group in America. Just over half of all Latino students graduate from high school, as compared with 77 percent of African-American students, and 82 percent of European American students. Of those who do graduate from high school, only 29 percent continue their education at the college level, and only 3.9 percent are eligible for the University of California. Among those students who do pursue post-secondary education, 80-85 percent enroll in community colleges. Of these, most drop out prior to completion of the program; only 8.4 percent go on to receive bachelors' degrees. Given these statistics, we recognized at the onset of the project the importance of integrating the Mexican-American/Latino community in a meaningful and participatory way.

The Puente program is implemented and conducted on campuses by a teacher/counselor team, full time employees of the college who are trained in an initial residential Puente Training Institute held at the University of California, Berkeley. Here teams are introduced to a) specific teaching and counseling methodologies; b) strategies for working successfully in the community; and c) collaborative ways of working as effective teams in order to integrate the program components. The training is on-going and extensive. Throughout the academic year teams participate in workshops to share successful practices, to learn how to train mentors, and to help each other solve problems. An organizational structure which includes liaisons in the field pushes the power down to a local and regional level with Puente liaisons helping local teams meet their needs as issues emerge. Essentially, the structure makes it possible to maintain program quality while training additional Puente counselors and teachers to help in the expansion of the program.

The success of Puente, and the degree towhich the Mexican-American/Latino community took ownership of it, surpassed our greatest expectations. Fifteen years later, Puente is operating in 39 community colleges throughout California and recently implemented a secondary school version of its program in 18 high schools across the state, with 4,000 new and continuing students in the Community College program and 1,700 in the High School program. A recent study commissioned by the University of California Task Force on Latino Eligibility found that the transfer rate of Latino students to four-year institutions is 44 percent greater in community colleges which have a Puente program than in community colleges without the program. The task force went on to recommend that the University "expand strategically targeted outreach services in the community colleges, modeled after the Puente Project, even at the cost of limiting other, less effective K-12 outreach activities."

Community input has been woven into the Puente Project at several levels. First, mentors are recruited from the Mexican-American/Latino community by other members of the community, as well as by Puente staff. Matching students with professionals in the community serves many purposes: it provides the students, many of whom are the first in their family to pursue post-secondary education, with successful academic and career role models; it offers the students first-hand exposure to various professional settings and responsibilities, thus helping them to make informed career decisions (well beyond what a college career counselor is able to provide) and to draw inspiration from seeing their mentors at work in a "real-life" professional context. Also, community-based writing and research assignments have proven to be a very popular and engaging writing assignment for the Puente students, many of whom come to the project with a firm belief they "can't write."

Another mechanism for fostering community support has been the inclusion of counselors who have personal experience with the Latino culture and community in the program. Initially, the counselors were introduced to provide students with academic and personal guidance that is grounded in their cultural context, and to recruit and match appropriate mentors for the students. It gradually became apparent, however, that the counselors were also functioning as a nexus for a community eager to provide support for Puente. Latino community organizations offered scholarships; Latino corporate groups invited students to professional conferences; local corporations adopted Puente classes. Far more people in the community were concerned and willing to contribute than we had anticipated.

Several prominent Latino writers have taken an interest in and contributed to Puente, including Jimmy Santiago Baca and Helena Viramontes. This reinforces the sense of community that the Puente students share and encourages them to grow as writers and community members. Puente's approach to the teaching of reading and writing was developed on the premise that if students are interested in the content of their writing and reading, and care about what they have to say, then the study of the formal aspects of language will follow. Therefore, cultural identity and experience are the focus of many Puente reading and writing assignments. Again, student response has been outstanding; many students who could not fill a page at the beginning of the Puente English course are found writing poetry and rigorous academic essays by the course's end. In 1994 Puente students in one community college initiated the idea for an all day writers and artists forum called "Día de la Cultura." The event was attended by 350 people, including eight nationally known Chicano artists. So successful was this forum that it has become an annual event.

For years the community has requested that Puente move into high schools. In 1993 we began a four-year replication project using resources already developed in local communities. In recognition of the fact that secondary schools generally have even fewer resources for funneling community support than do communit colleges, we created a new position for the high school program: the Community Mentor Liaison. The "CML's" actively develop partnerships with local community business people, civic leaders, and professionals; recruit and train mentors for the students; and help foster community awareness about and ownership of the project. (As a recent example, a Community Mentor Liaison in Southern California brought in 53 summer jobs for Puente students through one mentor.) Parent attendance at school meetings has reached 100 percent in some Puente schools; all the parents have met their children_s mentors. Organizations have donated books, tickets for events, transportation for field trips. The number of community members who wish to be mentors exceeds the number of available students.

Given the enormous challenges facing public schools and colleges in our contemporary society­financial, structural, and political‹it has become necessary to look to resources beyond those traditionally afforded the public schools. Add to that the almost overwhelming challenges faced by Mexican-American/Latino students in California, and it becomes necessary to fully integrate a greater societal force, a powerful and lasting source of on-going structural support. That force has been the Mexican-American/Latino community.

Back to Table of Contents of the Fall 1996 Issue of On Common Ground