Posted on Thu, Jul. 17, 2008
Southwest classmates sample college life in jumpstart program
By JOE ROBERTSON
The Kansas City Star

As the professor ventured into salacious details regarding Vlad the Impaler, one of her teenage students for the day raised the question:
“Is this a real college lecture?”
The answer: You bet it is.
All week long, ninth-graders who will make up the inaugural class at the Kansas City School District’s Southwest Early College Campus have been living the lives of the college students they are expected to become.
Some 90 students, most 14 years old, are living in dorms at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, getting used to roommates, carrying book bags to lectures and — be sure of this — taking notes.
“Write it down,” Professor Cynthia Jones called out.
She had just introduced bullet point No. 1 behind the origin of Vlad’s notorious reputation: The Massacre of the Beggars.
“Write it down,” she insisted over their squirming. “I’ll explain it.”
The students had already taken heavy doses of trigonometry, political science and life science, and now they were getting some world history through the tale of Vlad Tepes, the prince of Wallachia in ancient Romania and the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
“I love the idea of Southwest,” said Christian Clark, a graduate of Satchel Paige Elementary School. “I know it’s going to be hard. (But) I know this is the way I’m going to get out and go places and not have to worry.”
A lot of eyes are watching Christian and her schoolmates.
“You’re making history,” Kathleen Boyle Dalen, vice president of Prep-KC, told one lecture room full of students.
The new program at the former Southwest High School is a joint effort by the school district, UMKC and Prep-KC, a consortium of private investors in public education programming, along with the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute and The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
The Southwest Early College Campus, at 6512 Wornall Road, is opening for sixth- and ninth-graders in August. Successive grades will be added each year until it fills out as a math and science school for grades 6-12. The program intends to offer up to 60 hours of dual-credit courses to springboard students into college.
The students have a range of family experience with college. Some have parents who know firsthand all about university life. Others have parents without that experience, but who want it for their children.
Dawn Williams, Christian’s mother, is one of those parents.
Christian, a writer and a poet, is following the guidance of her mother, who also had Christian’s two older sisters on a higher education path. Christian’s oldest sister, Ashlyn, made it to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, but she was killed in a car wreck in 2007 after her freshman year.
“We were following her footsteps,” Christian said. “We were all in a row.”
Williams and many other parents were there Sunday night as their children checked into their dorms.
“I expect them to keep going one step at a time through life,” Williams said. “I tell them I’m giving them all I can right now, so they can go farther.”
Much of the school’s mission is about mind-set.
Parent Eric Lyons, whose daughter, Sion, also has attended other campus summer camps, declared that Sion, who graduated last spring from Allen Village Charter School, “will be the first of the Lyons family to graduate from college.”
And Sion, who wants to be a lawyer, doesn’t doubt it. After she moved into her dorm room for the week, she imagined adding amenities such as her fish, her floor rug …
“I seriously see myself there,” she said to fellow students.
Ngan Nguyen wants to get into magazine editing or something else in the arts.
Lorenzo Rodriguez wants to be a building engineer.
Veronica Blair wants to build social service programs for the homeless.
Collaborators with the district, like Jones and other UMKC professors, and the Life Sciences Institute, are essentially “working for free,” Jones said, “because this is the right thing to do.”
Her lecture, while provocative, was not easy. She hit them with the “difficult places on the map and the hard words … to make them rise up to it.”
And so they did, attentive for the most part, and inquiring.
Of course, when they learned at the end that they still had another lecture to attend before lunch, a groan rolled across the room.
“They’re like college freshmen,” Jones said afterward. “Tired and hungry.”
To reach Joe Robertson, call 816-234-4789 or send e-mail to jrobertson@kcstar.com.