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The Jasper Ridge/Eastside School Field Studies class receives Stanford Community Partnership Award 2008
The Jasper Ridge/Eastside School Field Studies class was honored by the Stanford Office of Public Affairs at the 2008 Community Partnership Awards annual luncheon. The event celebrates programs that benefit the local community and represent successful partnerships between Stanford and its neighbors.
The Eastside School Field Studies class, now in its tenth year, focuses on sixth-grade student researchers working in small groups taught by JRBP-trained Stanford student mentors during spring quarter. Eastside students collect data in their group's assigned ecosystem on air, soil and water temperature, pH, and percent canopy cover, and each student monitors his or her own plant for nine weeks. Eastside students spend four hours working at the Preserve each week, ending with a peer- reviewed poster session summarizing the five ecosystems studied. The sixth graders have special topic classes each week that are pre-taught at Eastside by their Stanford student teachers, who are responsible for the creation of the curriculum and class plans. This year, Stanford co-term Ben Graves taught ageologyand soils class, Hannah Larkin and Brandon Cortez taught botany and Samantha Staley taught ornithology, including beak adaptations and flight dynamics. Upcoming big topics for 2008 include a class to be taught Dave Bernstein and Matt Velasco on mammals and tracks, an insect class taught by Chloë Pinkerton and Ron Yeh, a riparian ecosystem class with Sam Staley and Dave Bernstein and a special class on global climate change with Claire Lunch. About Eastside College Prep (www.eastside.org) Each June, as Eastside seniors proudly march across the Quad to receive their diplomas, they become part of a tradition that was unimaginable a decade ago. Ever since East Palo Alto's only high school closed in 1976, all high school students had been bused out of their own community to high schools in neighboring, more affluent communities. Through the placement process, these students were assigned to non-college track classes. The results were dramatic: students from East Palo Alto dropped out of high school at the alarming rate of 65 percent. Of the 35 percent who did graduate, less than 10 percent enrolled in four-year colleges. 
Stanford graduate Chris Bischof was convinced there was another way. As a Stanford undergraduate, Chris had started an after-school program for East Palo Alto elementary school students that linked participation in basketball with daily tutoring. But Shoot for the Stars, as the program was called, could only take these students so far.
Chris began to explore the feasibility of bringing a high school back to the East Palo Alto community. In 1996, together with his Stanford classmate and fellow teacher Helen Kim, he welcomed eight ninth grade students to Eastside College Preparatory School. They didn't have a campus, so they met in a room at Plugged In, a computer learning center in East Palo Alto. But when Plugged In filled up in the afternoon with other students, finding new space took on a new urgency. Eastside students completed their first year by camping out in an unused room at Families in Transition in East Palo Alto.
Since that time, Eastside has grown to more than 200 students in grades 6 through 12. Our approach, requiring extraordinary dedication from both students and faculty, is geared toward the admission of every Eastside graduate to a four-year college or university. To date, we have met that goal with 100 percent success. Every Eastside graduate has gone on to a four-year college, including Stanford University, Santa Clara University, Pomona College, University of Pennsylvania, Tufts University, Princeton University, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia University, Amherst College, Yale University and Harvard University. If the story of Eastside College Preparatory School seems improbable, perhaps it is best summed up by Kiazi Malonga, a member of Eastside's pioneering class and a 2004 graduate of Stanford, who reflected, "We're a surprise. Like a rose growing from concrete." Photos by Nona Chiariello. |
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