Soaring on a Saturday

SOAR Day was last Saturday, April 20, at Chabot College. SOAR stands for Senior Onboarding And Registration. We take a Saturday morning to welcome local high school seniors who have already applied to Chabot College to guide them through the process of enrolling in classes for next Fall. We provide an overview of the college and the resources we can offer them, walk them through a worksheet that helps them plan for their first semester, and then we get them onto computers and coach them through their registration until everyone leaves with at least a partial schedule of classes for the Fall semester.

The day was absolutely incredible. The high school community truly showed up. I know of six different schools - including one private and one from Oakland - who came. I would love to get a full roster of all the schools represented. We were overflowing.

I still, even a few days later, remember the sense of pride that permeated all the young faces at the end of the day. Their faces beamed when they recognized that they had just registered for their first college classes. It reminded me of my time at Overfelt, when we celebrated every stage of the process. Counselors were embedded in senior classes every week guiding them through each college and financial aid application, and we held campus-wide events to highlight our seniors' first-choice schools as they applied and publicly celebrated all the places they ended up enrolling. As the application deadline approached, our counseling team would camp out in the library all day, with seniors pulled out of class -- over a hundred at any given point in the day -- to make sure they persisted in finishing the job. Every time a counselor confirmed that a senior was done with their application, they would ring a bell and the room would applaud. 

This is precisely how you build a first-generation juggernaut (and easily two-thirds of our Overfelt graduates every year were just that - the first in their family to go to college). You provide hands-on support that models determination. We eliminated barriers and excuses; seniors had no choice but to make those steps toward higher education. And they were honored for all their efforts, cheered at every stop because we know that, for families who don't have a college history, every part feels hard. Without a palpable sense of victory, without the communal applause, it is too easy to succumb to intimidation and overwhelm. 

Now that I'm working in at a community college, I see first-hand how the difficulties in the bureaucracy can stymie a student's (actually many students') aspirations and ambitions -- so much so that both of the high schools I previously worked in hosted workshops on campus where students could fill out community college applications, during the school day or right after school, with hands-on help from both high school and college staff. We held similar sessions for the FAFSA and CADA forms, long before the recent updates made the launch of healthcare.gov look smooth by comparison. So SOAR Day was, at its core, very familiar to me. It reinforced that we have to engage with students just as deeply as their high schools do; we have to hold these events that walk them through the bureaucracy with care. And even last Saturday, the system pushed against us a little bit, as the students who joined the event without an RSVP - the "walk-ins", if you will - had not been cleared to register. They still had a lock on their account that had to be manually, individually corrected. Thankfully, our lead counselors had the tools to do just that, and since the attendance in the computer lab where I worked was about double the number expected, those students (and several parental units) got to see us pro-actively troubleshoot and remove these barriers. They showed up for us, and they got to watch us dig in for them. Even though it nearly doubled the length of our registration session, causing me and several others to miss lunch, I firmly believe that the gratitude that was sown on Saturday will resonate across our community. We will see the fruit of that effort in the coming months.

There may be a sentiment that a teenager or family who cannot successfully navigate a college application is not yet prepared to attend college and be successful in those classes. There may be a sentiment that those who cannot RSVP for an event like this should have to suffer the consequences of waiting for help or possibly needing to come back for a later appointment. I challenge these notions on a few levels. First, our economy no longer sets high school graduates up with a sustainable livelihood; you have to pursue some kind of training and certification beyond 12th grade or your GED if you wish to have a career that offers anything close to a living wage. Therefore, college is no longer a luxury; it's a necessity, which means that we have to approach it as an essential community service. So why wouldn't we want to make it as accessible as possible? The community college system is, in itself, a revolution. Higher education began as an elitist institution, catering only to the families with legacies of privilege. We believe in the opposite: in a world that demands additional training beyond high school, we have a responsibility to provide that training to everyone. This is the challenge that our community puts to us when they walk onto our SOAR Day. They are basically asking us: "Are you truly accessible? Do you really mean that college is for me? Who may have just heard about your event the night before, but I set a Saturday alarm anyway and took two or three buses to make sure I didn't miss it? Even if I show up an hour after the 'check-in' time - are you going to reward the effort it took to come to campus? Or will you turn me away for not knowing about or not being able to jump over all the hurdles that the system puts in my way?"

I hope your local community college or university, or even your high school and adult school, answer this challenge the way we did at Chabot College last Saturday. I'm so proud of how we rose to this challenge, and welcomed all of our neighbors with a smile and a guiding hand. "Why yes, of course you can register. What's your name? Let me show you where to start. Vamos a empezar."