Diplomas Project: Supporting San Antonio’s Latino students

Editor’s note: NewsTaco Editor Victor Landa serves as chairman of the Diplomas Project communications committee.

By John Benson, Voxxi

Education leaders in San Antonio are setting the bar high regarding increasing Latino higher education attainment with a stated goal of a 9 percent increase or 66,000 college graduates by 2015.

The entire effort is called The Diplomas Project and is funded by a multiyear grant from the Lumina Foundation, which is a national financial supporter of post-secondary Latino students attainment efforts. The initiative is unique for its collective impact approach.

“This is a goal that we’ve identified and the way we want to get there is to work across sectors,” The Diplomas Project Director Maria Fernandez told VOXXI. “We realize that we can’t achieve this goal just by focusing on higher education or focusing on our K-12 system. It really requires the work of the business community, local government, community organizations and the educational field.”

The Diplomas Project brings together 16 organizations throughout San Antonio to identify some collective strategies that are going to support Latino student attainment and ultimately prepare them for the workforce in San Antonio. In its first year, the initiative is identifying student attainment barriers.

“We know that financial aid is huge, so what can we do in the advocacy of policy arena to make sure we’re eliminating barriers?” Fernandez said. “What can we do at the higher education institutions to make sure that the process is seamless and clear for students to be able to access the financial aid that they need?”

She added that The Diplomas Project is creating an alignment between efforts of school districts and community colleges. The idea is to make the transition seamless.

Last month The Diplomas Project convened the Destination College Week Higher Education Conference to lay the groundwork for increasing college attainment for the city’s Latino students. Out of that symposium, three concrete goals were established: To strengthen a shared understanding of Latino student attainment in San Antonio; discuss emerging issues, challenges and opportunities across systems; and develop shared goals and strategies to create a coherent plan to increase Hispanic student success.

The impetus behind the The Diplomas Project’s goal is tied directly to helping the San Antonio community meet the SA2020 educational goals championed by Mayor Julian Castro. Basically, the idea is that 50 percent of San Antonio’s adult population will have two- or four-year degrees by the year 2020.

“A few years ago, Mayor Castro launched a community visioning process to identify what do we need to do as a city to make sure it’s a thriving place where people want to come and learn and live here,” Fernandez said. “One of the things that happened out of that process is that 11 areas of focus were created to make some concrete advances. One of those was in education. When we started looking at the data, we saw that there was a significant need to also address the attainment of Latino students.”

That’s when the Lumina Foundation stepped in with a grant to promote Latino college attainment in San Antonio and specifically the 9 percent goal by 2015, which is roughly the halfway point of Mayor Castro’s goal.

As for a guide towards the program, San Antonio Education Partnership is basing its approach on a 2011 Strive Model by John Kania & Mark Kramer that offers guidelines for diverse organizations coming together to solve isolated and complex social problems.

The five conditions of collective success include establishing a common agenda, sharing measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, maintaining continuous communication and designating backbone support organizations. Fernandez said the San Antonio Education Partnership is providing the backbone support—staffing, meeting space and convening the partners.

“Having a thriving workforce in the long-term is going to be dependent on having an educated workforce,” Fernandez said. “That’s not just going to be the responsibility of the educational system. It’s going to be a shared responsibility. So what we’re working on here in San Antonio is to bring business, government, non-profits, students, families and educational institutions together so that we create that seamless pipeline that supports student attainment.”

She added, “In our city, Latinos constitute a significant portion of our population, so in order for us to thrive as a city, we also need to make sure Latino students are succeeding.”

This article was first published in Voxxi.

John Benson is employed as a fulltime freelance writer writing for local/national outlets. When he’s not covering news, music or entertainment, he can be found coaching his boys (basketball, football and baseball) or spending time with his wife, Maria.