At Fairfax High School, guidance counselor Linda Sheehey looked up last week at her latest project: a collection of 160 neon-orange, forest-green and maroon college pennants that dangled from the ceiling, like twinkling stars in the night.
At Wheaton High School, Kathy Moore, the college information coordinator, lugged college guides as heavy as gym weights into the "college war room."
And inside the college room at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, staffer Stacey Thomas carefully arranged folders thick with scholarship and financial aid forms, written in both English and Spanish. Then she reminded herself to fill the candy jar.
Dusted, painted and lavished with attention in the days before school starts, college rooms have become an essential part of many high schools. School guidance counselors and college recruiters report that such rooms are sometimes vital in motivating students to apply to college, especially those who are from low-income homes or whose parents didn't get a higher education.
Yet many schools with a high proportion of such students don't have a college room. Officials at several schools in the District, such as Banneker Senior High and Spingarn Senior High, said they don't have the space or funding to establish a room dedicated to information about colleges. Other D.C. high schools, such as Dunbar and Ballou, have some college materials and hope to beef up their collections soon with additional funds.
After seeking funding for several years, Bell Multicultural Senior High School in the District was able to hire a counselor and start a college center last year, complete with materials translated in Spanish for the school's 65 percent Hispanic population.
"It's small, but it has information that can really help," said Marco Vasquez, the school's coordinator of counseling. "It's really a very important thing to have."
College recruiters agree and say the rooms show students that their school believes they can go on to higher education.
"The underperforming high schools need these rooms the most, but they just don't have the same resources," said Masia Minters, who works on recruiting first-generation college students at the University of California at Los Angeles. "The students, therefore, just start on this tremendous disadvantage."
Inside the college room at T.C. Williams, the walls were lined last week with posters of leafy campuses and backpacked and Birkenstocked students.
On the shelves were books and CD-ROMs explaining college loan and grant programs and listing the best schools for pastry chefs, graphic artists and Russian literature majors.
"I wish I had something like this when I was in high school," said Thomas, a guidance resource coordinator at T.C. Williams, who was raised on St. Thomas in the Caribbean. She was busy hanging University of Maryland and Lebanon Valley College posters for the start of school tomorrow.
"For many students, there is this excited feeling of discovery of what their futures could be like when they come in this room," Thomas said. "Some didn't think college was an option before they came."
In Fairfax and Montgomery counties, each high school is required to have a college room. Guidance counselors are in touch with colleges constantly, requesting information that can be displayed in the room and inviting college officials to special sessions on topics such as financial aid and college essay writing.
"The idea is that there is one central place in the school to work on and think about going to college," said Sheehey, career and college center specialist at Fairfax High School. "It's particularly important for recruiters and parents. I do a lot of work with these kids and their parents. Just being able to walk people through the whole process with evening meetings and workshops--it's very needed."
College room counselors said they try to be fair in their display of materials, often putting college catalogues in alphabetical order and rotating prominent exhibits.
Some economically disadvantaged schools have the rooms, but they are sparse and don't have a full-time staff member, Minters said.
"Some just have a few books--old, old books," Minters said. "That's nothing like the war rooms you see at the affluent high schools."
Size also is an issue. In Montgomery County, at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, an entire class of more than 30 students can sit comfortably inside the college room, while the rooms at other high schools, such as Wheaton, can hold only about half that amount.
Many universities contribute to the disparity by focusing their mailings on elite high schools.
Moore, the career and college information coordinator at Wheaton, who makes morning announcements about the college room's latest offerings, said she sometimes has had to badger Harvard University to send her materials.
"They say, 'Quite honestly, when was the last time we got a Wheaton kid?' " Moore said. "But I'll make sure we get the stuff, even if it takes several phone calls."
Harvard officials said they keep a running list of which high schools have sent them students in the past, and they use that list to decide where to send materials. But they said they will send information to other high schools upon request.
Stanford University and many other elite colleges have the same policy. They note that their mailings would be prohibitively expensive if they went to all 25,000 high schools in the country.
Officials at Grinnell College in Iowa said they consider four things in determining which high schools will get their mailings: ethnic diversity, academic reputation, the guidance department's communication skills and the number of applications the school has sent them.
Grinnell has sent application forms and videos to T.C. Williams, Woodrow Wilson High School in the District and many other Washington area schools. But there are some schools that aren't set up to receive a barrage of information, Grinnell officials said.
"There are places where the management of the school has broken down to the extent of where we can't get through" to the guidance offices, said Jim Sumner, dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell. "The students there might be good and well-matched, but we can't get to them."
Even in the age of the Internet, the college rooms are popular with students. They are cozy places where students can peruse college ranking books and hold glossy brochures in their hands. The rooms are often brightly colored, with thick carpeting and puffy chairs not found elsewhere around the school.
At Blake High School, counselors hold lunch clubs, where students bring in their sandwiches and discuss different schools. The room has tan walls and built-in mauve and white bookcases.
At Wheaton, Moore holds special college-prep workshops in a room festooned with college posters.
"I did all my research in Wheaton's room, and it totally helped me set all my goals," said Elizabeth Melchor, who came to the United States from Mexico at age 3 and is in the first generation in her family to go to college.
She is now a freshman at Notre Dame University in Indiana, proudly wearing a Notre Dame sweat shirt.
Almost all her tuition is being paid through scholarships she researched in Wheaton's college room.
