Signposts

Aftermath: Marc Klaas paused the day after police found the remains of his missing 12-year-old daughter, Polly. The highly publicized murder led Klaas to push for stringent sentencing laws.

5 underreported stories that marked our times

By Greg Cahill

OVER THE PAST five years, Sonoma County has seen phenomenal growth. Traffic congestion and frustration, friction between the rural and urban elements, the burgeoning grape-growing industry and its impact on the environment, the skyrocketing cost of housing, the threat of street gangs, and the travails of local government and public officials–all of these events challenge us, spurring a search for answers.

As the community comes to grips with those changes, the Independent has sought to provide a broader voice in the community–though the newspaper has not always danced to everyone’s tune. Our news and features have resulted in a boycott by progressives, a lunchtime picket by angry gender crusaders, and more than a few threatening phone calls from irate gun owners, all reinforcing that old journalistic adage that if you’re not pissing someone off, you’re not doing your job.

There was no shortage of stories over the past five years that mirror this patch of flawed paradise we call home. The threat of the ever-encroaching mall culture. The inadequacy of local law enforcement’s response to domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault cases. The globalization of the local wine industry. The environmental degradation of the Russian River. The endless quest to flush Santa Rosa’s wastewater. The challenge of learning to live with HIV. The creation of a sane legacy for our children0.

Here are five stories published between 1994 and 1999–and revisited for updates–that serve as signposts for that nebulous thing called quality of life–the way we live, who we are, what we make of this world.

The Selling of Marc Klaas

“It’s almost too difficult to talk about all of this,” says Marc Klaas, picking through a plate of Belgian waffles and blueberries at a noisy Petaluma café across the street from the storefront that served as the first Polly Klaas Volunteer Search Center.

“We miss her more than ever,” he adds, his voice cracking with emotion and barely audible above the din of clattering dishes and Baroque music booming from the sound system. “It doesn’t get any easier–not at all. She’s just this little memory that’s always going to be 12 years old now.

“God almighty–it’s so fucked up.” . . .

That was the scene a couple of weeks shy of the first anniversary of the ill-fated night when a knife-wielding bearded stranger–later identified as ex-con Richard Allen Davis–carried Klaas’ daughter barefoot and sobbing from the bedroom of her quiet westside Petaluma home into the moonlit night on Oct. 1, 1993.

For nine sorrowful weeks, the world had focused its attention on Petaluma, where an army of volunteers and police searched in vain for the girl who became known as America’s Child. In a media frenzy, hordes of reporters and film crews from around the globe converged on this usually quiet community.

By the time police discovered Polly’s body on Dec. 4 beneath a pile of debris at an old sawmill just south of Cloverdale, Marc Klaas was a media star–an angry man crying for justice. His ordeal earned him a front-row seat in a legal battle for tougher sentencing laws that social justice advocates–and later even Klaas himself–would regard as a draconian nightmare.

In an exclusive 1994 interview, Klaas discussed with the Independent all the ways that he and others manipulated the media to keep Polly in the public eye, only to be manipulated in return by image-savvy news hounds and struggling politicians–including President Clinton and Gov. Pete Wilson–all looking for Three Strikes to boost their careers.

With the Three Strikes law already adopted by the state Legislature, Klaas argued in vain during the interview against a then-impending state ballot initiative that would make it even tougher to rescind statutes that sent any three-time felon to jail for 25 years to life, even for non-violent offenses. “I just don’t happen to think that stealing a basketball, which is considered a serious non-violent crime . . . should be held over somebody’s head for the rest of their life,” he said at the time.

The first legal challenge for the new state law came months later–a Sonoma County case in which Superior Court Judge Lawrence J. Antolini had refused to throw the book at a transient convicted of stealing cigarettes. The higher courts overruled Antolini, declaring that judges had almost no discretion in these matters.

Since then, 80 percent of the 50,000 felons sentenced under Three Strikes (now in effect in 23 states) were convicted for non-violent crimes, fueling a prison-construction boom that critics say has undermined funding for public education and threatens to stall the state’s high-tech economic engine.

As for Klaas, he is living in Sausalito and still involved in child-safety issues, but for the most part he has dropped out of the limelight.

Mean Streets

Bam-bam. Bam-bam-bam-bam. Two bursts. Six shots. The piercing snap of gunfire in the night is routine for Santa Rosa resident Kathy Ferrell, and so is fear. “Of course I’m scared,” she says. “What goes through your head is: ‘I just hope a bullet doesn’t come up here and hit my daughter.’ I pray every night that it doesn’t hit one of my children.

“Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” she asks. “I mean, the police are down here all the time, but always after the fact. I guess that’s the way it is with crime. I, myself, as a person, am fed up.” . . .

Back-street boys: Apple Valley Lane/Papago Court area teens posed in 1996 for an article about an area deemed “the most dangerous neighborhood” in Sonoma County. Gangs are still a problem, but things have improved, police say.

That was March 1996. After reading a three-inch item tucked in the back of the local daily describing a gang-related shooting and noting that local police had dubbed the Apple Valley Lane/Papago Court neighborhood that Ferrell and a few hundred other Santa Rosans called home “the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Sonoma County,” an Independent contributor set out for an in-depth examination of the situation. What he discovered was high crime and social decay exacerbated by absentee landlords, official neglect (the Santa Rosa City Council had promised low-interest loans to homeowners but failed to follow through on the pledge), a community wracked by ethnic differences, and police frustrated by limited resources.

Three years later, it’s still a rough neighborhood, but things have changed for the better. “There are still significant issues, but there is some neat stuff, too,” says Santa Rosa Police Chief Michael Dunbaugh. In 1998, the SRPD received a community crime-resistance grant that funds two patrol officers in the area. The 7-Eleven Corp. donated space for a police substation; local Asian, Hispanic, and Eritrean residents formed a multicultural center to help foster greater understanding and ease tensions; and a new neighborhood youth center is set to open soon.

“There are still problems associated with absentee landlords and gang issues, but there also is a lot of great dialogue underway in that neighborhood,” says Dunbaugh. “The neighborhood definitely is beginning to demonstrate a greater ability to push the gangs out.”

Sour Note

It just didn’t feel right. From the start, Raoul Goff, his three brothers, and their colleagues–with their “BMWs, cell phones, and cartel ponytails,” as one local describes them–stood out starkly amid the slow pace and quaint Victorian storefronts along the quiet streets of Occidental, the small west county town best known for its Italian restaurants and as a refuge for old-time hippies.

But it wasn’t just the newcomers’ stylish dress or their sometimes arrogant manner that seemed out of place to folks hanging around the popular Union Hotel saloon. There also were persistent rumors that Goff, a 35-year-old Sonoma County native, and some of his cohorts–who last year bought into a non-profit public trust that includes a kids’ camp, ecology center, redwood groves, oak woodlands, and grassy ridge tops–are devotees of the Hare Krishna faith, a secretive sect with a checkered past.

Some grumbled that Ocean Song’s new partners had concealed that fact. . . .

In July 1996, the Independent broke the story that Goff, the head of a San Francisco-based environmental organization called EcoCorps, had ambitious plans to transform the Ocean Song Farm and Wilderness Center into a busy religious retreat–a direct violation of the purchase agreement. Staff members at the beloved coastal retreat complained that EcoCorps had played a major role in the financial collapse of the organization and that the San Francisco partners had plans to take over the project altogether.

The story disclosed Goff’s connections to the Hare Krishna sect through past associations with a renegade Krishna leader who in the 1980s had created an armed camp outside of Hopland and with which Goff’s far-flung publishing interests had close ties.

As a result of the investigation, community members redoubled their effort to find partners to purchase Ocean Song and return the center to its original mission. These days, the supporters of Ocean Song are singing a happier tune. Former Green Bay Packer-turned-businessman Andrew Beath, 54, paid $800,000 of the $1.3 million paid to the Goffs for the coastal hillside property. But the fix is only temporary. Former staff members, who have raised $500,000 toward an option to purchase the land from Beath, have just 18 months to complete the deal. If they fail, Beath can resell the property.

Timber Wars

Upstream from everywhere in the Sonoma County basin, the evergreen mountains of Alpine Valley are home to spotted owls, towering Douglas firs, spawning salmon, and privacy-loving humans. St. Helena Road winds like a serpent through the valley. . . . In recent months, this idyllic forest setting has become a volatile battleground. . . .

Under a growing number of complaints from local residents frustrated by bureaucratic roadblocks in the efforts to deal with the plethora of logging underway in the county–much of it by vineyards coveting lucrative hillside plots prone to erosion and environmental degradation–the Independent in November 1997 presented the anatomy of a timber harvest plan, laying out in detail how the local logging industry had pushed hard on an Alpine Valley neighborhood northeast of Santa Rosa. At the time, E&J Gallo, Kendall-Jackson, and other North Coast vineyards were slicing through the county’s forests with little or no resistance from state and federal regulators, who virtually turned their backs on catastrophic timber harvests as long as the cuts were made to further agriculture.

The problem of “urban interface,” when quiet country living and the roar of chain saws collide, is still common, despite the adoption of a new hillside-planting ordinance advocated in the article and worked out over this past summer by growers and conservationists. Indeed, with implementation of the new county regulations just weeks away, vineyard developers–including those at pristine Quail Hill in rural Freestone–have redoubled their efforts to beat the October deadline and are bulldozing hilltops into local creeks at an alarming rate.

Meanwhile, former county Supervisor Ernie Carpenter stunned supporters earlier this year when he announced that he is working as a consultant for a proposed 4,000-acre vineyard conversion project–part of a massive 10,000-acre project that extends through west county into Mendocino County–that would lop down forests for the largest coastal winery in Northern California.

Jailhouse Blues

Joan McMillan’s journey “through hell and back” started last April [1998] on a short bus ride from the honor farm near the Santa Rosa Airport to the Sonoma County Jail’s main adult detention facility. Six months pregnant and busted for supplementing her welfare income, the 44-year-old faced jeers from male inmates sharing the ride. “I started having contractions,” she recalls. “I already had some [pregnancy] complications.”

It was a bad omen. At the jail, correctional officers placed McMillan in a tiny holding cell for nine hours, she says, and her physical condition began to deteriorate. “After eight hours I was experiencing dizziness and almost blacking out,” McMillan recalls. “My body was going into some kind of weird shock. I was sweating and I lay on the floor, freezing and shaking. . . .

“The next thing I knew, a female guard was kicking me on my hips and thighs, calling me ‘drama queen’ and ‘bitch.'”

That night the county jail staff moved her to an infirmary cell, but things didn’t improve, McMillan says. “I was throwing up, dehydrated, a total wreck,” she remembers.

“The medical treatment was horrible. I would ring the emergency buzzer when I was having contractions, but the guards, especially the younger ones, seemed preoccupied at the computers. They would ignore the buzzers as long as they could.”

The harrowing tales of neglect and alleged abuse at the Sonoma County Jail published in July of 1998 questioned the treatment of inmates and revealed that the health-care provider at the facility had an ugly past.

The two-part series earned the Independent the 1999 Lincoln Steffens Award for investigative reporting, and culminated three years of articles chronicling in-custody deaths, rampant sexual harassment of female sheriff’s deputies and correctional officers, and a porn scandal involving on-duty guards.

But change comes slowly at the beleaguered institution.

Assistant Sheriff Sean McDermott recently announced his plans to step down as jail chief as soon as a replacement is found. And the county Board of Supervisors has pledged to place the health-care provider’s contract renewal on the agenda next year for public debate.

New allegations continue to pour in to the newspaper from inmates.

Yet the public has shown little interest in the way inmates are treated or whether tax dollars are spent on possibly inadequate medical services.

As Abolition Road activist Charla Greene told the Independent last year, “Public opinion is against inmates.

“The feeling is they did something bad, so let them be treated bad.’ ”

From the August 19-26, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Harvest of Fear

Seeds of doubt: Author Richard Heinberg thinks genetically engineered crops may yield a grim harvest.

Author Richard Heinberg takes a skeptical look at genetic engineering

By Patrick Sullivan

UNDER COVER of darkness, a small group of people enters the quiet cornfield and goes to work among the rows, using their hands and feet to pull up crops and stomp them flat. When the intruders finish their task and depart, they have ensured that the harvest isn’t going to match the expectations of the farmer–who is, as it happens, a plant biologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

The crop stompers also have fired the first shot in what may be a newly confrontational battle against genetic engineering in the United States.

For this is no ordinary cornfield. Before the crops were destroyed, the Berkeley location was the site of a university experiment in genetically altered corn, part of an attempt to learn which genes are responsible for corn’s nutritional traits so that researchers can eventually produce sweeter or more protein-rich plants.

The crop-stomping incident, which took place earlier this month, underscores the strong reactions provoked by genetic engineering, the controversial high-tech practice of manipulating DNA to, among other things, create new varieties of plants and animals. While supporters call it the best hope to end world hunger, opponents say genetic engineering poses an ominous threat to human health and the environment.

The group of crop-pulling protesters–which reportedly included activists from Sonoma County–was inspired by environmentalists in Europe, who have long employed such tactics to dramatize their opposition to what they call “Frankenfoods.” According to some observers, the Berkeley crop pull and two other recent actions targeting genetically modified commercial cornfields in the Central Valley may be the first time these tactics have been employed in the United States.

And it won’t be the last, according to Richard Heinberg. The 48-year-old Santa Rosa author, whose latest book, Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology, a radical critique of genetic engineering due out in late August, was not involved in the Berkeley action. But Heinberg–who will read from his book on Aug. 26 at New College of California in Santa Rosa–supports such tactics because he fears that Americans are rapidly turning their farms and supermarkets over to genetically modified foods before anyone determines what dangers those products may pose.

While Heinberg’s book paints a grim picture of the power and momentum of the biotech industry, the author says the tide may now be turning. Americans, Heinberg says, are waking up to the dangers of genetic engineering. In part, that’s owing to new scientific evidence about the unexpected side effects of the technology, including a recent Cornell University study that found that pollen from a widely planted variety of genetically modified corn kills the larvae of the monarch butterfly, an important pollinator.

Still, despite growing public awareness, Heinberg–who is a faculty member at New College of California–argues that the urgency of the situation demands such radical actions as crop pulls–and such radical critiques as the one made in his book.

“This process [of implementing biotechnology] is moving very quickly, and I’m convinced that the likelihood of serious unintended consequences is very large,” Heinberg says. “I think in a situation like that, somebody does need to yell fire in a crowded theater, because there really is a fire.”

MANY AMERICANS don’t realize how deeply biotechnology already touches their lives. The United States now grows an estimated 75 million acres of genetically modified crops. Roughly 60 percent of the processed foods sold in America contain genetically engineered ingredients. But the average consumer doesn’t know that, in part because no labeling is required for such food–a fact that looms large in Heinberg’s book, which calls for legislation mandating the clear labeling of altered ingredients.

Of course, such measures have been proposed before, but so far both government regulators and the biotech industry have strenuously resisted. That’s partly because many polls show that a large percentage of Americans would refuse to consume food they knew to be genetically engineered, so putting such a label on a product could bankrupt a company.

Some defenders of biotech also argue that there’s no good reason for labeling because genetic engineering is, in one sense, nothing new. After all, humans have been breeding plants and animals to get desirable characteristics for thousands of years.

Genetic engineering, some supporters say, is simply a high-tech version of that traditional process.

But Heinberg and many others argue that such modern techniques as cloning and gene splicing allow scientists to tinker with organisms in fundamentally new ways to produce, as Heinberg puts it in Cloning the Buddha, “genetic changes that would never occur in the wild or through the most intensive breeding.”

The results of that process can be both impressive and terrifying. On the one hand, scientists are producing crops that grow quickly and resist pests. On the other, genetic engineering sometimes produces unexpected side effects that range from the inconvenient–like food allergies–to the potentially catastrophic.

In his book, Heinberg tells the alarming story of an attempt in the early 1990s to genetically redesign Klebsiella planticola, a common soil bacteria, to break down lumber companies’ wood waste into useful fertilizer.

The new organism was apparently on the fast track to EPA approval before an alert Oregon microbiologist determined that it was both lethal to plants and extremely competitive. If it had been introduced into the general environment, the new strain of Klebsiella might have spread quickly and wreaked ecological devastation, turning forests and fields into dead sludge.

HEINBERG USES such incidents to buttress his contention that Americans must work quickly to learn everything they can about genetic engineering in order to come to grips with the urgent practical and moral issues that surround it.

“This technology is poised to reshape our lives at very basic levels: the food we eat, how we reproduce, what our children look like,” Heinberg says. “These are pretty important issues, and we really can’t just leave them to the experts, because the experts tend to be very highly trained in very narrow fields of knowledge. They really aren’t equipped to make the kind of basic ethical judgments that affect all of society.”

Cloning the Buddha goes straight to what its author sees as the root of the problem–the mechanistic scientific worldview that spawned biotech in the first place. In an era where new technology presents us with difficult choices, Heinberg believes that we need a new ethic–and even a new spirituality–to sort out right from wrong.

For an example of these sticky dilemmas, Heinberg turns away from agriculture to offer his readers the difficult issue of genetic therapy, which may soon be used to alter the DNA of human gametes or fertilized eggs to prevent some diseases.

“Well, on a micro level, yes of course, anybody would have to agree with that,” Heinberg says. “But how do you define a disease? Tay-Sachs? Sickle cell anemia? Sure, everybody would agree that those are diseases. How about shortness? Or male-pattern baldness? Are these diseases that would require genetic intervention?

“Where do you stop?”

At a time when, according to Heinberg, a basic genetic engineering laboratory can be put together for as little as $20,000, gene therapy is just one of the difficult issues likely to confront Americans in the near future.

The author hopes we’ll be ready.

“It’s entirely possible that genetic engineering could have a wide range of ethically acceptable uses once we have put it under some kind of public control and scrutiny,” Heinberg says. “What I’m saying is that we haven’t had that conversation yet. We haven’t thought through the issues.”

A three-part series on biotechnology begins at New College of California on Thursday, Aug. 26, with Heinberg’s reading. The series continues on Sept. 28, with a lecture by Dr. Ignacio Chapela, chair of the Microbial Biology Department at UC Berkeley. Finally, on Oct. 26, Britt Bailey, co-author of Against the Grain: The Dangers of Genetic Engineering of Crops, lectures. All events begin at 7:30 p.m. at 99 Sixth St., Santa Rosa. A $5 donation is requested. For details, call 568-0112.

From the August 19-26, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Rich Harvest

MICHAEL AMSLER

School-garden projects are blossoming all over

By Paula Harris

IT’S AUGUST and La Tercera Elementary School in Petaluma is closed for summer vacation, but the campus garden is bustling with activity this mellow morning. Several students and parents scurry among the tall golden sunflowers in the butterfly and hummingbird habitat area, intent on their various tasks: deadheading plants, collecting seeds, watering the herbs, and amending the soil.

“I love it here,” says Becky Dunaway, an outgoing 8-year-old with long dark hair and a quick smile, as she digs in the dirt. “We plant seeds and watch the plants grow. If they’re vegetables, we get to eat them. If they’re flowers, we get to take the seeds and plant them and watch them grow all over again.”

These families are “baby-sitting” the school garden, which organizers say has in two years gone from a committee-based concept to an award-winning community project, which is the pride of students and parents alike.

This year, La Tercera was one of 300 schools nationally to win the National Gardening Association Youth Garden Grant. The project is funded by donations from county businesses.

“Our garden is in the lush and blooming shape it’s in right now because 20 families volunteer to come in and care for it during the summer vacation,” says Denise Ward, a parent volunteer who became school garden director when the project began in 1997.

Ward says all the school’s students, grades K-6, help care for the garden and learn valuable lessons from doing so, and she laments the lack of state dollars for such projects. “The state should supply more funding and understand that in nurturing and caring for things, children are less likely to hurt themselves or the world around them,” she says. “Your mind is in a different place when you’re gardening and growing something.”

TINA POLES, school-garden teacher trainer for the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which helps public and private schools in Sonoma County start and sustain organic gardens, agrees. “The school garden is a kind of a growing place that tends to lend itself to being very respectful of life and our processes, and I think children sense that,” Poles says. “In a well-done program, the garden is a place to just be. Sure, you can do lessons in it, but it’s also a place to just be and do work, move barrels of dirt, and make compost piles, and there’s an end product. It’s very concrete– you do this and things happen.

“Kids really love that–they don’t have a lot of that in their lives.”

Poles has seen transformations in students as they work on the garden projects. “It seems to calm children down who need to be calmed down, and it excites children who are passive,” she says.

In addition, Poles observes, the garden is a healing place for children who may live in a small apartment or who haven’t had much experience with nature and being outside. “[The garden] is an incredibly good antidote to too much television and too many video games,” she says. “You can’t do those things in the school garden, so in some ways you’re saved from all that stuff.”

For the past two years, the OAEC has offered a five-day residential training program for local schoolteachers and parents (of kids from preschool to high school) who are interested in creating and maintaining a school garden. A recent workshop was attended by teachers from a dozen local schools planning to add a school-garden project to their curricula.

To help nurture this growing trend, the OAEC has also established a Sonoma County School Garden Resource Network. “This links people who do horticultural work in Sonoma County with schools,” explains Poles.

The network offers technical assistance, donations of materials, and other support services. Among member organizations are the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, the Sonoma County Office of Education, the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, and Sonoma County Jail Industries.

NEXT SUMMER, the network will host a national school-garden project symposium at Sonoma State University, which will include a variety of speakers on the topic. The OAEC teacher-training program, offered twice yearly, consists of hands-on organic gardening sessions; an examination of curriculum development to see how the garden can fulfill state-mandated curricula at all grade levels (the garden is an outdoor laboratory that can provide a natural setting for integrated curricula); a course in nutrition, including a garden harvest lunch; and a course in teaching art in the garden.

Speakers from Occidental’s Harmony Elementary School, which has maintained a very successful school garden for several years, share their knowledge and ideas with the OAEC trainees. The goal is that the students should be part of the entire design process and feel total ownership of their new garden.

Intertwined throughout the program is information about fundraising for gardens and networking with the community to keep the project alive. School must often rely on grants and donations to keep the garden going. “It’s a constant struggle, but people in community have been very generous,” says Poles.

One such community member is Joan Betts, who last year handed out more than $60,000 worth of plants to local schools. As part of her Master Gardener Project at SSU, Betts operates Cinderella Nursery, a non-commercial facility near Rohnert Park. She works with companies such as Home Depot to provide schools with much-needed greenery. “We get last week’s plants,” she says with a laugh. “The reps pull everything that’s not premium off the shelves because people insist on everything in perfect bloom–so we pick ’em up.”

Betts tends to peaked plants, restores their health, and donates them to school gardens and other youth-garden projects. “Gardening is a necessary tool for learning,” says Betts. “Children need to understand the environment, and they learn through growing things. If they can respect growing things, they can better respect the land and make better environmental decisions in the future.” *

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Edge

Tutoring programs for college-bound teens are catching fire

By Janet Wells

KENT PINGREY didn’t want to spend six weeks of summer vacation and every Saturday hitting the books. What teenager would? But now that the 19-year-old Rohnert Park native is on his way to an engineering degree at San Diego State University, he’s glad he spent his leisure time dissecting pigs and calculating rocket-projectile vectors.

Pingrey is one of almost 1,000 local high school students each year who participate in programs through Sonoma State University that prepare them for an increasingly competitive college-admissions gauntlet.

When Pingrey was in middle school, he was recruited by Sonoma State’s Academic Talent Search, a federally funded program that offers workshops on everything from study habits to self-esteem, the Saturday Academy, tutoring, and field trips.

At Rancho Cotate High School, Pingrey chose to participate in 3-1-3, a joint program with SSU that identifies 30 at-risk ninth graders and enrolls them in rigorous college-preparatory classes. Senior year is a combination of classes at high school and at Sonoma State, which allows most participants to then complete their college degree in three years.

“The program made it so much easier here,” Pingrey says of his first full year at SSU. “I already had a couple of classes under my belt and knew my way around. Some students when they come in, they don’t really even know how to take notes.

“The real benefit is that they make sure you’re on track, that you’re fulfilling the requirements and your grades are good,” adds Pingrey, who has transferred to San Diego State for the fall.

In addition to intensive academic tracking, SSU’s pre-college academic development program has 50 tutors logging more than 12,000 hours helping students at public high schools around the county.

Pingrey, self-assured and motivated, didn’t bother with academic tutors until his senior year, when he was taking calculus at SSU.

“Then I was in there every day,” he says.

THESE DAYS, fulfilling the high school graduation requirements isn’t enough for students who want to go to college. Even good grades and decent SAT scores don’t guarantee admission. To help their chances, students now do summer internships, play sports, and perform community services to show leadership qualities. They take honors courses to boost their grade-point averages. And to show that they can stand up to academic challenge, they participate in pre-college programs like those at SSU.

“It used to be that college was for kids with a lot of brains who could get scholarships or those who could afford it. Historically, it was the rich person’s privilege,” says Gloria Miller, director of pre-college programs at Sonoma State University. “People have recognized that pretty much without a college degree you don’t get a chance at the better-earning jobs. Now people are better off as a whole economically, so college is a possibility for many more people.

“You wouldn’t think with us being in the backwater of Sonoma County we’d be competitive,” Miller adds. “We are.”

Sonoma State, with about 6,000 students, accepts 80 percent of its applicants. More than half of those have a grade-point average of 3.0 or better, according to the National College Board website. San Francisco State University accepts 69 percent of its applicants, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the most competitive state university, takes only 38 percent of those applying. Then there are the really tough schools, like the University of California at Berkeley, which accepts just 31 percent of its applicants, most of whom have 4.0 grade-point averages or better.

By comparison, Stanford University accepts 15 percent of applicants, and Harvard just 13 percent.

KARLA MARROQUIN’S parents hoped that she would go to college, but as recent immigrants from El Salvador, they didn’t speak English and had no idea how to begin to maneuver their 8-year-old daughter through the system. Sonoma State’s academic-talent-search staffers found her in seventh grade and steered her into Upward Bound, a four-year program for low-income high school students who are the first in their family to pursue a college degree.

As part of Upward Bound, Marroquin went to summer school at SSU, enrolled in the Saturday Academy, and attended tutoring sessions every Wednesday after school.

“You grew up in the program. Every Saturday we’d talk, kind of like a support group,” she says. “There was more support than in high school. The [high school guidance] counselor put me in English as a Second Language classes automatically. The Upward Bound staff went around and put me in college prep classes instead.”

Two years ago, Marroquin graduated from Casa Grande High School in Petaluma with a 3.66 GPA, heading in a very different direction from her friends.

“They were going to go to work when out of high school,” says the 19-year-old SSU sophomore, who plans on majoring in economics and going into international relations.

“Most of my friends got pregnant, got married. They have different ambitions than I do now.”

For more information on Sonoma State University’s pre-college programs, call 664-2428.

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.