Academy Opens Doors For Minorities, Girls
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 3, 2007
A single classroom at Montgomery County's poorest high school has yielded $1.6 million in college scholarships for its students. Of the 26 students in the Wheaton High School engineering academy, three will attend Cornell, two will go to Penn State, and one each will attend MIT, the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
"In the past, we didn't have those high-profile schools coming after our kids," said Shane Stroup, the academy head, who has worked at the school for 13 years. "And now, it's starting to happen."
Some of Stroup's students embarked on the four-year Academy of Engineering program with Ivy League visions in their heads. But it was a dream none could afford without help. The school serves the highest-poverty student population of any high school in Montgomery. Half the class will be the first in their families to go to college.
Wendy Avelar, 17, had wanted to study engineering at an Ivy League school since the seventh grade, and her $186,000 scholarship to Cornell University seemed the fulfillment of that dream; she turned down an offer from Stanford. But her mother had never heard of Cornell and didn't share the enthusiasm until she happened to mention the name to a woman whose house she was cleaning.
"Then she realized how, like, prestigious the school is," Avelar recalled. "And then she got really excited."
There was a round of congratulations toward the end of March, when many members of Avelar's class, the first to graduate from the program, learned they had been accepted at their first- and second-choice schools. But the real celebration didn't begin until a month or two later, when the offers of financial aid began rolling in.
"My mom told me, 'Don't get your hopes up, because there are still 50,000 what-ifs you have to worry about,' " said Massielle Begazo, 18, who waited on aid packages from Cornell and Carnegie Mellon before accepting Cornell's offer of $140,000.
Begazo grew up in Silver Spring. Her father, born in Peru and trained as a college professor, waits tables. Her mother, an accountant from Honduras, works as a teacher's assistant.
As a child, she showed traits of a future engineer: "the Legos, putting together my own bike, taking apart the VCR. I knew I was different," she said.
A middle school counselor steered her into a University of Maryland preparatory program called El Ingeniero, which aims to attract Hispanic students to the field. She was primed for the new engineering program at Wheaton.
Wheaton's program is part of Project Lead the Way, a national nonprofit organization that has introduced pre-engineering courses into 1,300 high schools and middle schools across the nation over the past decade. Its mission is to address the shortage of engineers and to increase the representation of women and minorities in the field. Women, for example, make up 10 to 15 percent of engineers.
"There unfortunately is that disconnect that occurs, usually around middle school, in terms of society thinking that engineering, science, technology, et cetera is for boys, not for girls," said Crickett Thomas-O'Dell, director of marketing and school relations for Project Lead the Way.
Six of the 26 graduates at Wheaton High are female, and all but three are minority.
That three female graduates will attend Cornell is "indeed unusual," said W. Kent Fuchs, dean of engineering at the university, in an e-mail. He noted that the university had "purposefully reached out to these students," offering them a combined $494,000 in scholarships.
Avelar grew up in Wheaton and met Begazo, her future Cornell classmate, at El Ingeniero one summer in middle school. She, too, liked "breaking things apart and figuring out how they work."
She chose Wheaton's engineering program from a list of three academies introduced at the school a few years ago. They are among dozens of such programs that have sprouted at the region's high schools, each promoting some academic specialty as a way to better define the school, to link studies to college and careers and to promote small, specialized learning communities among the students.
Such programs vary in quality, and some ultimately fail. Wheaton administrators purposefully chose an established brand. Students take one or two elective engineering courses each year, along with advanced math and science courses and other honors or Advanced Placement offerings. Stroup's students designed bridges on computers, worked with robots and visited a Harley-Davidson plant in Pennsylvania, along with an eager retinue of parent chaperones, to see how motorcycles are built.
"We wanted to offer an academy where there's jobs out there," Stroup said. "Some of them have these wonderful-sounding academies, but where are the jobs?"
His graduates are likely to earn $50,000 a year or more as entry-level engineers if they stay the course -- a selling point for the students of Wheaton High, two-fifths of whom qualify for subsidized meals.
Senior Richard Mancco, 18, said his father, who repairs cars, was prepared to refinance the family home to cover the tuition at MIT until the school came through with a $151,000 scholarship. Mancco, who chose MIT over Harvard, wasn't even expecting to get in. Now he plans for graduate school.
"Maybe owning my own company," he said. "Time will decide."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.