It was warming on a cool and windy Sunday Streets off the Great Highway June 14 that people sometimes gave us vignettes of what City College of San Francisco meant to them.
"Closing down City
College would be like shutting off the main artery in the city," a young
man commented. The mother and father of
a student who'd had an unsuccessful year at Gateway were hoping to find a place
for their daughter at CCSF. Another
couple, Ron and Christina Chun, gave a
particularly inspirational account.
Their
daughter, Gabrielle, found out while still at the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA) that she could take
courses at City College after finishing her sophomore year in high
school. Even though English AP courses were available at SOTA, she wasn’t able to get a seat in the AP class
and was assigned to a regular English class for her junior year. So during the summer, Gabrielle took the CCSF placement test and
was able to directly enroll into English 1A in the fall, meeting the English
high school requirements and earning college credits at the same time. This was very good news because she
sometimes found regular high school classes a bit distracting with all those
spitballs flying around the classroom when the teacher wasn’t looking.
After
her first semester at CCSF, she kept taking CCSF courses along with her high
school courses, completing 15 college credits,
with her parents providing transportation from CCSF to SOTA for her
morning classes. She found that CCSF students, often paying
for their own classes, seemed more mature, focused, and less inclined to mess around. Her
parents say they were also really impressed by the kindness of the
instructors.
Starting off in college wasn’t easy, Gabrielle was struggling on her final English
1A paper with Richard Simon and didn’t have much of a rough draft for an
in-class peer review, and the pressure
was getting to her at the time she was trying to recover from strep
throat. Embarrassed by what she had written, she broke down in tears that day, so Mr. Simon reviewed her draft alone and gave her
the feedback and encouragement she needed to complete the essay. She got an A as her final grade in that
class.
For
her evening English 1B class, the instructor Nathan
Wirth, stayed with her after class until
her parents picked her up so she wouldn't be alone at night in the
building. Gabrielle was surprised that
Nathan Wirth already knew about her from Richard Simon and said he had been
looking forward to having her in his class.
"She didn’t realize that she was already developing a reputation
around campus," her father said, marveling at how the two caring
instructors conferred with one another for the benefit of a student.
Gabrielle was able to return the
kindness that she received at City College and connect high school with college when she was taking a CCSF course in Theatre, her passion, At SOTA, she performed in 42nd Street and Monty Python’s Spamalot, at YPTMTC (Young People's Teen Musical Theater Company) she landed a lead in Cats as Mr. Mistoffelees,
and finally, at San Francisco Youth Theater Company, she got to go on tour throughout the Bay Area performing an original work by Emily Klion and Gary
Soto, In and Out of Shadows, a
musical on undocumented teens in America.
In Spring 2015, when she was
taking a CCSF acting class with Deborah Shaw,
Deborah’s daughter, Kaeli, was applying to SOTA's musical theater
program. Gabrille happened to be one of
the seniors managing the yearly nerve-wracking audition process and was able to
help steady Kaeli’s nerves and encourage her throughout the audition. (Suffice it to say, Kaeli will be part of the SOTA’s class of
2019!)
In
her final semester at high school, Gabrielle and her father also took a cooking
class together at CCSF. Christina wanted him to have the chance to spend
as much time as possible with their daughter, and she wanted her daughter to
learn to cook before she left home for college. At the beginning of the
semester, they began to make muffins together and built up to more complex
dishes such as pies, and cakes, homemade soup stocks, and various dinner
entrees.
Since she got a head start earning
college credits, her initial plans were to complete her Associate’s Degree at
CCSF after high school and then transfer to a four year college, but Gabrielle went
ahead and applied to and auditioned at a handful of her musical theater dream
schools in New York, where the
acceptance rate is anywhere from two to five percent. She was accepted and granted a scholarship at
Theater Arts program at Malloy, which is
in partnership with the music theater conservatory, CAP21.
The result will be like the hybrid
program she created for herself at SOTA and City College! Her freshman year, she will take academic
classes on Long Island for three days a
week and commute to Manhattan for the other two days. In her
subsequent years, she will be training
in Manhattan for three days a week and taking classes at Molloy for two days, so she will be experiencing both the “hustle
and bustle” of Manhattan and the traditional suburban college life.
"We
really appreciate what City College offered our daughter," the parents
said. “She can challenge herself fully and get ahead in pursuing her
college degree as a high school student.
It’s like hitting three birds with one stone. Many of her CCSF classes fulfilled her high
school graduation requirements, she earned
college credit automatically without having to deal with passing the AP
exams, and she had free time to perform
in musicals with the various theater companies in the community because each
CCSF semester class equates to two semesters in high school.”
As
you may have guessed, this write-up involved contact with these caring parents
after the Sunday Streets, but it began there.
We really appreciate the exchanges Sunday Streets foster, making us feel
good about City College and rest of the community we live in! It's also worth noting that both the Sunday Streets and the YPTMT where Gabrielle performed in CATS are sponsored by The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department!
The
next Sunday Streets will be in the Tenderloin on July 12. The CCSF Enrollment Campaign will focus on
getting out the word that the Civic Center Campus, closed at its 750 Eddy
location, will hold classes in the fall at the Art Institute at 1170 Market
Street.
