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ALSO
IN THIS ISSUE Championship Turf Tender Sounds of Success New Home in Urban Village In the Spirit of the Season Pace Yourself Fill 'er Up With Fries Chancellor's Column Development News Factoids Newsmakers Accomplishments by faculty and staff… |
New Home in an Urban Village City Heights is not the kind of place you are likely to read about in the travel section of the Sunday newspaper.
By
the early 1990s the area was ripe for renewal and a movement began to
create a highly innovative “urban village,” virtually in the
heart of City Heights. It
took awhile, as most major urban projects do. But with the inspiration
and financial backing of retired businessman Sol Price and Harvard-educated
former city councilman William Jones, there are impressive signs of progress
everywhere along the streets of the City Heights’ Urban Village. There’s
a new combined police station and community center colorfully out of character,
decorated in attractive teal blue, rusty red and gray (colors selected
by neighborhood residents). It is a friendly place that attracts youth
rather than frightening them away. An Olympic-size swimming pool and tennis
courts are part of the layout. A
new library, one of the best designed and most heavily used in town, recently
opened its doors. A
brand new Rosa Parks Elementary School arrived in the nick of time, but
is already over-crowded with nearly 1,500 students. Two-thirds of them
do not speak English as their native language, reflecting the enormous
ethnic mix of the area. In the construction stage is a new shopping center
and a cluster of affordable townhouses. At
the area’s crossroads is the district’s new Mid-City Continuing
Education Center (pictured above). The attractive building, already open
for business, isto be formally dedicated this spring, with state and local
dignitaries on hand.
The
Urban Village Mid-City Center is no ordinary neighborhood college outpost.
It is the culmination of at least five years of community and college
district effort, and is being hailed as an urban village “gem,”
offering an intriguing array of courses for a neighborhood of newcomers
searching for opportunities to grow beyond their current limitations. It
is not unusual, for example, to see clusters of colorfully robed and hooded
Somali women carefully pouring over the keyboards of their computers,
as they struggle to master English while they attain office skills. Classes
are jammed, and some vividly reflect their ethnic diversity of the area. In
one class of 20 students, there are immigrants from nine different countries–China,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Somalia, Ukraine and Vietnam–sharing
the challenges of the new technology. Mid-City
is the newest, but it is just one of the six Continuing Education Centers
that are burgeoning with fresh programs, ideas, a new president and nearly
100,000 students each year. As the program’s spirited slogan says,
“Imagine the Possibilities.” Excerpted
and reprinted with permission from the January/February 2001 issue of
the Urban Community College Report. |
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Sense of Hope If
you want to talk about true survival English, try moving a school, says
Ann Marie Damrau, English as a second language department chair . “For
the first month Mid-City had no screens for the overhead projectors, no
pencil sharpeners, no off-street parking, no bookstore, and no elevator.
After climbing the stairs to the third floor for two weeks, a mover reported
losing 15 pounds,” she said. “We like to think of it as a bonus:
You get paid to work out.” After
several reports of students receiving $50 fines for illegally crossing
the street, “jay walking” has become an essential term taught
in all Mid-City classes. The
Mid-City instructors deserve gold medals for their patience and flexibility,
according to Damrau. The move gave them all an opportunity to be creative
and resourceful. Like all moves, it was difficult but they say it was
worth it because they have a beautiful new building filled with spacious
classrooms in the center a re-emerging community. Students
are proud to come to the new school. One instructor noticed that her students
were dressing better than before and attributed the change to the pride
they felt about their new school. “I think I’m not alone in saying that the new building has given each of us, in one degree or another, a sense of hope, pride and community,” wrote Rolly Abernethy in a holiday note to the center’s faculty and staff.
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