Grantee Profile: Toddlers and Parents Go to College

Moradhi, 18 months and Mozart, 3, went to college recently. They were accom-panied by their parents Jorge and Lourdes Casas, for whom the visit to UCLA was a first, too.

The Casas family was among 40 parents and young children who explored the sprawling Westwood campus as part of an outreach program focused on college-readiness. The unique program for parents and toddlers is sponsored UCLA the Lennox School Readiness Center, a First 5 LA grantee.

"It's never too early to start parents thinking about planning for their children's college education," said S.P. Andrade, director of the Lennox program. "When we started in 2003, less than half of our mothers and one-third of our fathers were high school graduates. They had little knowledge of how to prepare their children for college, since many had never set foot on a college campus themselves."

According to Andrade, research shows that academic preparedness must begin before children start kindergarten. She said most children in Lennox, a predominantly low-income Latino community, are already developmentally 18 months behind the average California kindergartner when they start school.

As part of the program, parents were asked to write down their child's dream career, and then craft an educational path for them, encompassing every grade level from preschool to the university.

Mozart Casas says he wants to be an astronaut, and his parents have already started funding his college savings account.

For more information, contact Lorena Marin at lorena_marin@lennox.k12.ca.us or (310) 330-4976.