SECTION II. PROGRAM BACKGROUND
by ANN PENDERGAST

Demographic & Education Context

When looking at the racial breakdown of Hoover high School, the numbers haven’t changed much in the last 4 years or so. In looking at the years 1998-2001, the population of the school is approximately 50-55% Hispanic, 20% African American, 16-19% Asian and 5% White leaving roughly 2% of the population to fall under the “Other” category.

Hoover High School is in the City Heights District. This area is a gateway community for new immigrants to this country which explains the large percentage of Hispanic and Asian students that attend Hoover. This neighborhood is of a lower socioeconomic level and is a Chapter 1 school. What this means is that 80% of the students at Hoover are in a program that provides them with a free or reduced lunch every day.

In researching the percentage of students that actually go on to college, we found that only 30% achieve this goal. Many different items go into this percentage beginning with grades. In looking at the students grades, the percentage of students who received above a “C” average jumped from 65% in Math and 85% in English between the years 1998-2001. Another thing that should be looked at in finding out why more kids don’t go on to college is the percentage of students even completing the minimal course requirements for a UC school to even look at them. The good news is even though the grades have been decreasing over the years, the percentage of students completing these requirements has increased from 21% to 30% between 1998 and 2001. One major point that our group wanted to stress was the number of students scoring well enough to be considered for a 4-year school. In the four years between 1998 and 2001, the mean score for the Verbal portion never exceeded 379 and the mean score for the Math section never surpassed 443. The combined score of those two don’t even go beyond the 900 mark. What is even more surprising is the fact that the percentage of seniors that even took the exam never reached beyond 40%. The good thing is that if 30% of the students go on to college and 40% of seniors take the exam, then at least 75% of the students who take the exam receive scores high enough to be considered for college. Sometimes, in place of the SAT exam, students can take the ASAT exam which is a more culturally diverse test. Though we weren’t able to find any major trends, we do notice that between the years of 1998-2001, the percentage of students in grade 11 that received a score that ranked them above the 50th percentile never reached above a 23% in reading, a 31% in Math, and a 33% in language. In order for these students to be able to even have the opportunity to go on to a 4-year college, they need to have access to a program that can prepare them for these tests.