When he isn’t studying Chaucer and Gaelic literature at UCLA, Regents Scholarship winner Alexander Gabrovsky (top left) enjoys playing the violin and studying Chinese. Julia Dobrovolsky (top right) is planning to go to law school after earning her B.A. in English at UCLA. Kristen Glasgow (bottom right) had a successful career as a songwriter and musician before enrolling in school at Santa Monica College. Born in Taiwan, Jiuan-Ru Jennifer Lai (bottom left) moved to the United States in 2000; she received a Cal Grant as well as a Regents Scholarship. A native of Germany, Christoph Seitz (center) made his living as a photo-journalist before he returned to school at SMC.

Rewarding Achievement

Thousands of Santa Monica College students have transferred to UCLA during the seventy-five years of the College’s existence, and some of those students have been awarded the prestigious Regents Scholarship before, but never before now have five SMC students received Regents Scholarships in one year. “I love UCLA,” says Kristen Glasgow, one of those fortunate five. “It’s like I’ve died and gone to university heaven,” adds Glasgow, now majoring in art history and a former winner of the Mario G. Semere Scholarship at SMC. “But I never could’ve made it without Santa Monica College.”

The Regents Scholarships, which are only awarded to students who have maintained a straight 4.0 GPA, provide incoming freshmen and transfer students with full tuition and whatever additional financial support they need to make it through the academic year. Recipients of the program are selected on the basis of demonstrated academic excellence, leadership, and exceptional promise.

“I was very fortunate,” says Christoph Seitz, a native of Germany who is now majoring in political science at UCLA. Seitz, who has been awarded $13,000 per year through his Regents Scholarship, credits Professor Elie Chalala at SMC with giving him the direction and guidance which set him on his path to UCLA. “What has happened to me is really unbelievable,” says Christoph. “I am really grateful to SMC for preparing me for UCLA and whatever lies beyond.”

Although Julia Dobrovolsky is planning on taking the LSAT and going to law school, right now she’s very pleased to be studying Pushkin, Chaucer, Dickens, and Latino Literature at UCLA. “I was seventeen when I started at SMC,” says Dobrovolsky, “and I liked all of my teachers there.” Besides winning a Regents Scholarship, Dobrovolsky also received a scholarship from the SMC English Department for an essay she wrote on Voltaire.

Jiuan-Ru Jennifer Lai received a Cal Grant as well as a Regents Scholarship, and enjoyed each and every aspect of her two years at Santa Monica College: “The clubs, the classes, my professors—everything was terrific at SMC and it totally prepared me for university.”

And Alexander Gabrovsky also believes that SMC got him up to speed for the academic rigors of UCLA: “Every professor I had at Santa Monica College contributed to my intellectual development,” says Alexander who is studying Chaucer and Gaelic literature at UCLA when he’s not pursuing his hobbies of playing the violin and trying to learn Chinese. “They were very committed to teaching and every one of them was willing to work with me on a one-to-one basis. Of course I did a lot of work, but their attention to me really made the difference.”

Another four Santa Monica College students have also received prestigious scholarships from UCLA starting this past Fall semester, in connection with UCLA’s Transfer Alliance Program (TAP).

The TAP program seeks to strengthen academic ties between UCLA and specialized transfer programs at community colleges such as the Scholars Program at Santa Monica College.

In all, 30 TAP scholarships were awarded to community college transfer students to UCLA from throughout the state.

Rosette Abayahoudian, Regina Cronenweth-Schneider, Amanda Vignone and Mary Kathryn Burgess from SMC will each receive $4,000 a year for two years. Recipients are selected on the basis of academic merit and financial need.

#1 in Academic Achievement!

The Santa Monica College Advantage for Student Success!

• This past year, SMC was the state leader in transfers to the University of California and the state leader in transfers to the University of California and the California State Universities combined!

• SMC was also the state leader in transfers to the University of California of Latino students and of African American students!

• SMC was also the state leader in transfers to such private colleges as USC and Loyola Marymount!

For an Easy, Affordable Move into American Culture…

Spring 2005 Offers International Students
a Great Beginning to Their College Careers!

Santa Monica College is #1 in transfers to UCLA and the University of California. Many international students choose Santa Monica College to begin their college careers because of SMC’s transfer success, high quality teaching, and low cost.

Intensive ESL at Santa Monica College will help you make real progress in college. This program offers a strong plan to help students improve their skills in speaking, reading, listening, and writing English. For admission requirements and more information, you can contact SMC’s International Education Center on the main campus, or call Darryl-Keith Ogata, Director of International Programs, at (310) 434-4159. For information on the web, go to www.smc.edu/international.

SPEAK / READ / LISTEN / WRITE

English — Intensive ESL

20 hours a week of English instruction in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Classes are provided at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. This is the best program to help you improve your TOEFL scores in a short time! Students can begin the academic program at Santa Monica College from any level. Classes begin February 14, 2005. Tuition is $1,500.

“Coming to a new country, it’s better to start small… SMC really helped! Intensive ESL is like a little community—you spend a lot of time with other students and the teachers are right there taking care of you!”
—Galina Inzhakova, now at UCLA in Fine Arts

Educating Educators

“The early childhood education program here at Santa Monica College is just terrific,” says Hilda Urena, who, besides being a former student at SMC and the mother of a ten-year-old boy, is a teacher’s assistant at Lincoln Adult Education Center, a yard-duty teacher at John Muir Elementary School, and a mentor in SMC’s Even Start Program. “Yes, it is true,” she says, “I am very busy, but I love what I am doing. I loved the teachers here at SMC, and I am really looking forward to being a pre-school teacher—that is what I have always dreamed of doing, and Santa Monica College is helping me make that dream come true.”

There is always a job for a good teacher, and no one can deny that a teacher can make all the difference in a child’s life. Santa Monica College and El Camino College, long recognized as premier community colleges in California, were jointly awarded a Title V grant for $3.4 million over five years in October of 2004 making SMC and El Camino the schools of choice to attend for those who want to go into teaching. “All elementary and secondary school districts are phasing out emergency teachers,” says Professor Edie Spain who chairs SMC’s Education and Early Childhood Education Department.

“Non-credentialed teachers (due to the “No Child Left Behind” federal mandate) will cease to exist. That is why there is a big push for credentialed teachers, and that is why Santa Monica College is stepping in to fill the void.” The new funds will assist Santa Monica College in recruiting future teachers, especially students majoring in science and math, to become middle and high school teachers. “It is so important to cultivate and nurture future teachers before they are redirected into other careers,” says Spain.

The grant will also facilitate the recruiting of future teachers within the Santa Monica-Malibu and Los Angeles school districts. “We will partner with future teacher clubs in high schools throughout the greater Los Angeles area and encourage those students to come to SMC,” continues Spain. “There is a desperate need for such students and we want to be the people recruiting them, teaching them and mentoring them along as they move ahead in their profession.”

Santa Monica College has also just announced a new partnership with UC Riverside through the Copernicus Project, a program funded by a $11.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to target and recruit teachers from high school and community colleges who are excelling in math and science. With an allocation of $460,000 spread over five years, SMC will participate along with three other community colleges.

SMC’s teacher preparation courses are designed to recruit teachers and give them opportunities to practice the needed skills long before they are standing alone in front of their own classroom. “We want to recruit future teachers, but we do not want them to wait until they are seniors in college or actually teaching in a classroom to discover that maybe they do not like kids all that much and teaching is not what they want to do with their lives,” says Marilyn McGrath, an SMC program director and a member of the California Teacher Credentialing Commission.

Education classes at SMC are sending students into pre-school and elementary school classrooms for up to fifty hours to find out if teaching is indeed the field they want to enter. “You better love children and love teaching if you are going to enter this profession,” says McGrath, a veteran of more than 25 years in education, “because the pay is abysmal for preschool teachers and only a little better for those in the K-12 system. While it is getting better—when I started out as a sixth grade teacher, we were making four thousand dollars a year—it is still much lower when compared to other professions.”

For those who have just begun their careers as teachers at the pre-school and early elementary levels, SMC also provides an ongoing support program. “Mentoring is absolutely vital if teachers are going to succeed,” says McGrath, who is the Program Director for SMC’s Professional Development Institute (PDI) for early childhood educators. “We are losing teachers from preschool to 12th grade at an alarming rate. Over 50 percent of teachers leave the field in the first three years. PDI is an effort at the preschool level to retain teachers. Beginning teachers must have the guidance of a veteran teacher to help them feel confident and competent in their role as teacher.”

Besides Title V and new education courses, SMC has recently kicked off another special project focusing on family literacy, receiving a $1.02 million federal block grant for the Even Start Project. Even Start is a family literacy program that supports the parent as their child’s first teacher. “For children to be school ready, there has to be parental involvement in order for a child to succeed in school,” says Joe Ryan, the program manager. PACT (Parents and Children Together), a chief component of Even Start, provides workshops for parents of children infant through seven years; they include biweekly parenting skills workshops and literacy activities that engage both the parent and their child at home. “Reading and literacy skills are essential, as everyone has known for a long time,” says Ryan. “Parents must be involved; the earlier the better.”

SMC has created partnerships with a host of other entities to get Even Start up and going in the greater Santa Monica Area: the Venice Family Clinic, the Santa Monica Child Care and Early Education Task Force, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, the Santa Monica Library Youth Services Program, the YWCA of Santa Monica, the Westside Family Health Clinic, Venice Skills Center, and Connections for Children, a referral service for families on the Westside of Los Angeles.

Two more components that Santa Monica College is putting in place to assist future teachers are the capabilities to put together an E-portfolios for education students and a one-stop Epicenter (educational pathways to information center) for future teachers. “Students will have in hand a computer disc with samples of their classroom projects and assignments and videos of themselves actually teaching in a classroom,” says Ryan. “When they apply to a university or go for a job interview, they will present this disc to demonstrate their accomplishments.” SMC’s one-stop Epicenter will allow future teachers to find out about career and higher educational opportunities, course and transfer requirements, credential information, and financial aid, without having to flail about from place to place trying to discover this valuable information.

If that were not enough, the Education and Early Childhood Education department will be moving into new, more spacious quarters at the Bundy campus adjacent to Santa Monica Airport in August of 2005. “It is a great time to come to Santa Monica College to learn how to become an early childhood educator or an elementary, middle or high school teacher,” concludes Edie Spain. “Some students will even find themselves beginning with young children and perhaps realize such experience makes for an even better K-12 teacher. It is an extremely exciting time for us.”

“It’s so important to cultivate and nurture future teachers
before they’re redirected into other careers.”
—Edie Spain, Early Childhood Education Department Chair

Community Notes

Bond Measure Passes

Thanks to extraordinary public support from the Santa Monica and Malibu communities, Measure S was approved in the November 2, 2004, election. This $135 million bond measure will fund a new career opportunity center, an early childhood lab school, a performing arts complex, and physical education fields available for student and public use.

Feds Grant SMC $6.2 Million

Receiving its two largest federal grants ever, Santa Monica College has been awarded Title V grants totaling $6.2 million over five years that will be used to help first-time college students succeed and to help train teachers in the face of a national shortage.

UC Transfers Increase

SMC continues to lead the state with 900 transfers to University of California campuses in the 2003-2004 school year, nearly twice as many as the second-best transfer college. UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley were the top choices for SMC students. SMC also leads the state in transfers to UC schools by both Latino and African American students.

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