Bolstering college readiness in a rural school district
In 2016, only 32 percent of high school graduates in Northern California’s Humboldt County met admission requirements for California’s four-year colleges, well below the state average of 45 percent. With support from the Gardner Center, local educators were determined to work together and chart a new path forward.
The challenge
Large, rural school districts like Humboldt face limited resources, while their students often face difficulty transitioning from small middle schools to comprehensive high schools — not to mention long travel times to and from school.
The solution
With leadership from the Humboldt County Office of Education, educators engaged in an effort to get a clearer picture of college readiness and completion among local residents. The Gardner Center designed and led a process to help them gather and analyze data, as well as determine how best to use it.
During the first two years of the project, a core group of K–12 and college educators adopted the College Readiness Indicator System toolkit and took a deep dive into school and district contexts, indicators of college readiness, and tailored interventions.
Key takeaways
A spirit of cooperation, willingness to devote considerable time and energy to the project, openness to changing course, and a focus on long-term and sustainable results enabled participants to:
Redesign credit recovery opportunities when they learned that retake options for some core classes didn’t meet college eligibility requirements
Create a Freshman Academy to help students who would benefit from a focused transition from a small, rural setting to a much larger campus
Establish funding to continue their efforts after seed funding from the College Futures Foundation ran out
Photo: Shutterstock
