A+ college-prep program: one on one, over and over

When I ask Jamie Dao when she first knew she was going to get that golden ticket — a college acceptance letter — she looks at me with widened eyes.

"I never knew," the 17-year-old Franklin High School senior says. "None of my family has ever graduated from high school."

Yet this spring, Dao, the daughter of Vietnamese-Chinese immigrants, got the sought-after fat envelopes from 11 colleges and universities — including the University of Washington, Washington State University, the University of Tampa and Hawaii Pacific University.

But what's most amazing is that there's nothing unusual about Dao — at least not in the room at Franklin where I met her. Dozens of college-acceptance letters paper the wall. All addressed to kids from families, like hers, in which no one has ever gone to college before.

"To be honest, I didn't know I even wanted to go," says Reuben Santos, 18, who got into UW and Western. "It wasn't in my world. I was like 'Oh well, I'll just go get a job.' But they kept pushing and pushing on me."

"They" is a program called College Access Now that operates in three Seattle high schools. It boasts an unheard-of success rate working with groups of kids who, on paper anyway, are among the most at risk of fading off after high school and never going on to college.

Through last year, 252 kids from low-income families in which nobody has gone to college had gone through this program. And 252 were accepted to college. That's a perfect record, 100 percent, among a demographic group that typically goes to college at less than half that rate.

This year, the program has an additional 127 seniors (at Franklin, Garfield and West Seattle high schools). So far 93 percent have been accepted. The story this spring has been how hard it is to get in the UW, but dozens of this group have gotten in there. As well as to 50 other colleges and universities — including places such as Harvard, Columbia and Johns Hopkins.

How do they do it? I visited the Franklin High group to see. One of the program's mottos is a quote from a former Harvard University president: "The least bright rich kids are as likely to go to college, and more likely to go to a good college, than the brightest poor kids."

One of the students, Amanuel Zewoldi, 18, summed up how they're trying to change that: "They're on your back. I mean, they've got your back."

A lot of both, it turns out. The program's staff cajoles the kids to show up, take the right tests, meet the deadlines. Plus the staff mentors them on how to study, write the essays, apply for aid. All the stuff that falls on parents in homes where college is part of the culture.

"We chase them around the school incessantly," says Frank Wagner, the site supervisor at Franklin.

"We call them at home on the morning of the SATs. We text them constantly. We track them down," says Christine Chew, College Access Now's director.

"They made me sit down with them, one on one, over and over," says Adiam Woldu, 17, who is going to UW next fall. "I didn't know it, that's what I needed most."

One on one, over and over, may be what works. But it isn't cheap. Even though College Access Now relies on dozens of volunteers to go along with a paid staff, the program still had an operating cost of about $1,100 per kid last year, mostly because it's so labor intensive (the money all comes from private donations.)

The astonishing success raises a burning question: Why not copy it and expand it dramatically? To cover all low-income juniors or seniors. Or for any kid who wants help navigating the Byzantine path into college.

The pushback is likely to be: It's too expensive. In Seattle public high schools there are 6,000 juniors and seniors. So just in one district an expanded program could easily cost millions of dollars a year.

"People in education want what are called the 'scalable' solutions — meaning your program can be scaled up to reach larger and larger numbers for less and less money per kid," says Chew, a former Microsoftie. "But as soon as you do that, you can lose what made it work in the first place."

You can't get stronger evidence than one hundred percent that something's working here. If education needs to be scaled, maybe it should be down — down toward the one-on-one — not up.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.