The classroom was almost painfully quiet at Warren Central as a college recruiter tried to liven things up with an activity similar to playing Family Feud.
She asked students to consider prompts like “Name experiences to list on a resume” and “Name skills you should practice in high school to prepare for college and careers after high school.”
But students up and down the rows shook their heads when they were encouraged to take a guess. That was until Yazmin Sanchez and a couple students got to talking.
“Is a career fair an answer?” the freshman asked. “What is that?”
It’s the type of question mentors with Indianapolis nonprofit La Plaza encourage.
They know the students they’re working with are young and hope that over the next four years the teens will grow more comfortable with one another and the future-facing questions.
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” La Plaza’s educational programs director Mariana Lopez-Owens said. “Our goal is just to expose them, help them get their feet wet.”
The students are a part of La Plaza’s recently reworked Tu Futuro program. In Spanish, “tu futuro” means “your future.” The program is designed to make higher education more accessible to Latino students at a time when college-going rates are trending down.
In Marion County, about 37% of Latino students in the class of 2022 enrolled in college after high school, according to the most recent data published by the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, down from a high of 45% in 2017.
“There’s still disparities,” Lopez-Owens said. “I just don’t think there’s enough being done. This is just the little part that we can play to try to help.”
Relaunching Tu Futuro
In the past, La Plaza mentors would meet once a week with students at as many as 20 Indianapolis schools for 10 weeks during their junior and senior years.
But, Lopez-Owens said, La Plaza decided to rethink its program after community members asked the nonprofit to go deeper with students.
“These kids just don’t just need help their junior and senior year,” Lopez-Owens said. “Sometimes it’s a little too late when you’re teaching them about colleges, especially the seniors, especially if they didn’t get the right coursework to get into the right school.”
La Plaza relaunched Tu Futuro in 2019, just before the coronavirus pandemic. Mentors at first worked only with Lawrence Township’s two high schools and set a cap of serving no more than 20 students per school.
They asked students as freshmen for a four-year commitment and designed a weekly curriculum to follow the teens from their first steps in high school to planning for graduation and beyond.
That was a big draw for educators at Warren Central, who came on as Tu Futuro’s third partner school this year. Julie Mitchell, a Warren Central graduate who started teaching at the high school last year, said she sought out the program after hearing about it during a summer program.
She said when she rejoined the school she noticed students encountering some of the same struggles — navigating college applications and scholarships — that she and her classmates faced in 1997. She gathered the support of her principal and the school guidance department and set the partnership in motion.
“It was like, ‘This is the need,’” she said. “‘How do we make it happen?’”
Support for teens who need it
Warren Central worked with La Plaza to identify students they thought would get the most out of the effort. Program sponsors didn’t necessarily use grades or class difficulty to select students but made sure the teens had an interest in pursuing college after high school.
“There’s some kids that get it already — they’re involved, they’re in sports, they’re taking AP classes. They have somebody. But, these kids,” Lopez-Owens said referring to the teens in Tu Futuro, “we want to be that somebody for them.”
La Plaza is launching the new Warren Central cohort with only freshmen students this year. The program will phase in additional grades each year, and students will work through the cohort together, taking some similar classes, so they can get to know one another over time.
Once a week, during an advisory period, 18 students meet in the school’s Freshman Learning Center. They play games, hear guest speakers, like the college recruiter, and take field trips to university campuses. In the summer, they’ll be invited to workshops that introduce them to different career fields and teach them about mental health.
Activities follow a set curriculum and are designed for each grade level. Freshman students take career aptitude tests and begin with an introduction to college. But there’s also a recognition that these students were just eighth graders last year, newly navigating the large hallways of Warren Central’s 3,400-student campus.
Elvis Aguilar, a freshman, says he wants to learn more about how his GPA works and what he can do to earn scholarships. He’s interested in Purdue University and thinks he might want to join the Air Force, which will help pay for his college.
Transitioning to high school, however, wasn’t easy. Warren Central is big, Aguilar said, and he’s been late to some classes. But he’s found support at Tu Futuro, where he’s learning how to schedule his classes in high school to set him up for success later on.
“I’m getting better at it,” he said. “I’m finding new paths and trying my best not to fail.”
Learning to be an advocate
Sophomore year will include a community advocacy project where students are encouraged to partner with a local organization like Gleaners Food Bank or the Indiana Undocumented Youth Alliance to take on an issue they’re passionate about.
Their work could include organizing a food drive or writing to a senator. Lopez-Owens said the project teaches leadership skills and provides an experience students can put on their resume.
As students get older, Tu Futuro might offer more tailored guidance on how to pursue an internship or job shadowing experience. And college visits will continue.
Lopez-Owens said creating spaces like Tu Futuro for Latino students is especially important so that they can learn to effectively advocate for themselves and their education. She speaks from experience.
As a teen in Indianapolis, Lopez-Owens said she was once discouraged by a counselor from taking an Advanced Placement class. More recently, she said, La Plaza supported a student from another school who was wrongfully denied access to a meeting about Indiana’s 21st Century Scholars program because a staff member assumed the middle schooler was undocumented and ineligible for the scholarship.
“The people who work in this area, we’ve kind of lived through it,” Lopez-Owens said. “The goal is still to help Latino students graduate from high school and go onto college, but we’ve also opened up different career paths, and leadership is a big component of the program and advocacy.”
Relationships continue past high school
Tracking the progress of the four-year program is difficult, Lopez-Owens said, given how new it is.
The pandemic and staffing shortages put some of the nonprofit’s work on pause, so the past two school years have brought a fresh start for Tu Futuro.
Before the restructuring, Tu Futuro saw 95% of its students graduate high school. Lopez-Owens said she’s dreaming bigger for students in the current cohort. Her goal is to see 99% to 100% graduate. And the support doesn’t end there.
“We want to continue supporting them with any career and college questions they might have during college,” Lopez-Owens said. “We want to be their advocates if they’re not being heard.”
The organization is also considering additional scholarship incentives for those students and has long-term hopes to grow the program if it can raise enough money to hire additional educational specialists or consider moving into a bigger space capable of serving more students.
While Tu Futuro currently meets students at their schools, teens are invited to La Plaza’s far eastside location for summer programming and other family support services.
Francisco Gomez, an academic coach at Warren Central, said he encourages his students to be present for every Tu Futuro meeting. It’s a program he said he wishes he had in school.
“From the first day, I told the kids, ‘Take advantage of this, because you guys are so lucky to be in a program like this where, basically, they’re coming to you, trying to help you out,’” Gomez said. “I came here when I was 7 years old. I didn’t know any English, and when I was in high school, they didn’t have programs like this.”
Mirror Indy reporter Carley Lanich covers early childhood and K-12 education. Contact her at carley.lanich@mirrorindy.org or follow her on X @carleylanich.
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