April 08--Students in South Los Angeles public high schools will soon receive priority admission to Cal State Dominguez Hills.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles Unified School District announced an agreement with the university to guarantee admission to students at Local District South high schools who meet requirements.
Those include completion of the A-G course requirements that all L.A. Unified students will need to graduate, as well as certain GPAs and SAT scores on a sliding scale. The district's south area encompasses roughly 20 high schools and magnet programs with about 4,700 current high school seniors.
The goal of the program is to get more students from the schools into science, technology, engineering, arts and math fields, which together are often called STEAM.
The agreement also includes students who completed a local district STEM or STEAM elementary or middle school magnet program. It does not include continuation schools, or independent or affiliated charter schools in the area.
"We don't have an abundance of students lining up to become STEM majors, especially in the South district," said Kamal Hamdan, director of the Center for Innovation in STEM Education at Cal State Dominguez Hills. "We need to increase the representation of underrepresented groups, especially the African American male population.... We are just simply failing that population."
But students are eligible even if they don't pursue a STEM major.
As part of the program, schools will introduce younger elementary and middle school students in local STEM and STEAM programs to the university through visits to the school and faculty visits to campus, Hamdan said.
The last piece of the agreement is an effort to bring Dominguez Hills students back into their community with STEM and STEAM teaching jobs at local schools that are traditionally hard to staff. The agreement does not specify how many jobs will be offered each year.
"They'll be passionate, and they'll understand where our students are coming from, the barriers that they face," said L.A. Unified's south district superintendent, Christopher Downing. "They'll also serve as role models ... because they came from that very community."
The university and district will not cover tuition for students who are accepted, Downing said, but many local students will qualify for federal and state funding. Tuition and fees this academic year add up to about $6,200.
Other districts, like Long Beach Unified, have existing college promise programs with schools to grant admission to all qualifying students. A similar agreement exists between Garfield High School in East L.A., and Cal State L.A.
Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli.
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