March 28, 2007

High praise for West Side high achiever

By Jeanne Russell
San Antonio Express-News

Anjelica Collins navigated the socially turbulent world of middle school with care.

She forged two tight friendships and became the first girl president of the technology club at her West Side middle school, but lost a bid for student council president. She honed her ability as a flutist and public speaker.

Her mother, Rosario Colunga-Collins, said she was always a bit reserved, and the academic gifts now earning her honors seldom are the stuff of adolescent popularity contests.

The 14-year-old recently won a four-year, merit-based Batten scholarship to Culver Academies, a boarding school in Culver, Ind., where she plans to enroll in the fall.

Last year she won a chance to study at the University of Kansas during the summer, and this fall she won a national Jack Kent Cooke award for young scholars, what her mentor calls "the Nobel Prize for seventh-graders."

Not bad for a kid who attends the Rhodes Middle School technology magnet program on the West Side, where the San Antonio and Edgewood independent school districts come together.

In her Batten scholarship essay, Anjelica described the neighborhood as "synonymous with dropouts, gangs, drugs and leads the city in teen pregnancies."

Anjelica was among 63 students selected in 2006 by the Virginia-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation from more than 800 low-income, high-achieving seventh-graders.

The scholarships, which reach students with an average family income of $25,000, provide financial support and an academic adviser who stays with the student from eighth grade through high school.

Named for the late owner of the Washington Redskins football team, the foundation has research showing that smart low-income kids — those in the top quartile on aptitude tests and in the bottom half economically — make up about 7 percent of American schoolchildren, said Joshua Wyner, vice president for programs. These students are being lost at every grade level, and only about half graduate from college, he said.

The middle school years are fraught for virtually all kids. But they're tougher on low-income kids, who face particular challenges throughout their school years.

The scholars program seeks to catch high-achieving, low-income kids early enough to nurture them through adolescence, at an age when opportunities for magnet and summer programs as well as selective high schools open up.

"There are some developmental things going on that inform how one works with middle school students," Wyner said. "That said, I think it's dangerous to pick any period of time and say this is the most important time to work with students. We lose high-achieving, low-income kids throughout the education pipeline."

For her recent string of achievements, Anjelica credits the influence of her mother, three favorite teachers at Maverick Elementary School and especially Teresa Van Hoy, a professor who teaches SAT preparatory classes after school to San Antonio Independent School District middle school students.

Van Hoy started the San Antonio Stand and Deliver program in 2002 because she felt her boys, Rhodes students, and their magnet school classmates weren't being exposed to academic opportunities such as a Duke University-sponsored summer program for brainy adolescents.

Anjelica was one of two participating seventh-graders who scored high enough on her SAT to study medical science for three weeks last summer at the University of Kansas .

"Just to spend a half hour debating the newest medical discovery. ... If I started talking about that at Rhodes , I'd get some pretty weird looks. I was never once called 'nerd.' I used some pretty big words. We discussed books. It was wonderful being with people who were at my level or above," Anjelica said.

Though it pains her to leave her mother and two closest friends, on a visit to Culver she took comfort in the dorm room of another Batten scholar, decorated with photographs of friends from home.

"At a boarding school, everyone is starting over. The uniform thing helps. If you accomplish something, it's because of what you do," Anjelica said.

The Batten scholarship also pays for Anjelica to participate in a mission that could take her anywhere from Louisiana to Croatia to do social service work during the spring of her sophomore year, and an international educational experience her junior summer, said Larry Bess, Culver's associate director of admissions.

Bess said Anjelica impressed him from the moment she showed up for an interview at a San Antonio hotel.

"She was just extraordinarily confident, but it was a quiet, steadfast sort of confidence. She asked such strong, sound questions," he said.

Anjelica hopes Culver will provide another springboard. She recently asked Van Hoy to hand-deliver a letter to Sorin Istrail, a Brown University computational molecular biologist with whom she'd like to study one day.

"We come from a very, very traditional Hispanic family. You didn't leave the house until you were married and made your own home," Colunga-Collins said. "Having to work as a mother and now as a single mom, you have to evolve. Our girls have to ... stand up for themselves. If she wants to be a wife and mother, that's great, but if she doesn't want to, then (she has her) education."