Minority Students Thrive With Support From Peninsula College Fund

REDWOOD CITY (KPIX 5) After 30 years in advertising, this week's Jefferson Award winner decided to go back to teaching. That decision both opened his eyes.. and opened the door to college for more than 100 kids in the Bay Area.

As one of seven children, Charles Schmuck always appreciated what he had growing up, but in 2005, he began to feel especially grateful.

"I don't remember having a conversation with my dad saying, 'Well, is it ok if I go to Santa Clara? Or Can you afford it?' It was like, 'You're going to go to Santa Clara and we'll find the money some way,'" he recalled.

Years later as a teacher, Schmuck was seeing that many minority kids didn't have that kind of money for college. And even when they did, very few finished.

"You look at what happens six years, not four years, six years later -- only one in 5 have graduated after six years," he reported.

So in 2005, he launched the Peninsula College Fund to help kids who'd be the first in their families to go to college, have a better chance of succeeding. Most have a household income under $50,000.

Working with nine high schools in East Palo Alto, East Menlo Park, and Redwood City, PCF provides a qualifying student with a $3,000-a-year scholarship, summer job placement, internships, and mentoring. The first year, Schmuck sent three kids off to college. Today, because of PCF, 74 kids are in colleges all across the country, and 51 have graduated.

Thanks to PCF, Tania García-Piña went to college at Cal is now working on her Master's and Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.

"I was considering going to community college," she said. "I was considering going to San Francisco State or something like that and then transfer. I really wanted to go to Berkeley and they made that final."

Stanford Professor Tomás Jiménez is her PCF mentor, a job he says is his way of giving back.

"My father, much like Tania, came from Mexico when he was young," Jiménez explained. "(He) didn't speak English, initially struggled through school, but had amazing mentors in his life who helped him get through."

For Schmuck, he hopes the program will continue to have unknown benefits.

"We'll never know all the impact this program has had because it's going to be the Tanias of the world who influence somebody who's not even in our program, who in turn influences somebody else, who influences somebody else," he said.

So for providing young people with the opportunity to go to college and opening doors to the future, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Charles Schmuck.