4:00pm | Local education leaders gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the Long Beach College Promise, which encourages students to pursue higher education and provides tools and resources for them to do so. The College Promise is an agreement between the Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College and California State University Long Beach to provide students a direct path from elementary school to college.
“Long Beach’s economic future is at stake,” said F. King Alexander, president of CSULB. “We will build Long Beach, but it starts right here in preschool and kindergarten.”
The College Promise works by offering advantages to LBUSD students as early as elementary school, providing students interested in higher education with resources, counseling and priority acceptance into local colleges; the idea being that students will become more interested in pursuing higher education if they begin thinking about it at a young age and are provided with tools that may not be available to them otherwise.
The anniversary event also handed out scholarships totaling $1,500 to middle school students, and an LBCC foundation announced $6.5 million in funding that will fund an initiative in the College Promise to provide one tuition-free semester at LBCC to graduates of LBUSD schools.
As a result, all LBUSD graduates who enroll at Long Beach City College for the Fall 2010 semester will receive a scholarship for free tuition.
Also today, a Progress Report was released by the three education systems showing that the College Promise has increased interest in higher education and better prepared local students to pursue college degrees.