Warren Furumoto's tutors help teens cross high school finish line

Harvard University dropped a bomb with its 2005 study revealing California’s overall high school graduation rate as 71 percent, fully 16 percentage points lower than the 87 percent officially listed by the state, based on 2002 figures.

Alarming is too gentle a word for the situation, said Warren Furumoto, director of Cal State Northridge’s Center for Academic Preparedness. To Furumoto, monitoring the dropout rate is like watching the lifeblood drain from the state’s future. The last 12 years of his career at Cal State Northridge have been devoted to finding a way to stop the hemorrhaging, and he believes he and his colleagues at the center have found a least one way to do that.

A center project called the Teacher-Tutor-Student Collaborative drove down Sylmar High School’s dropout rate from a jaw-dropping 45 percent for the class of 2004 to 30 percent for the class of 2006.

“Last year was the largest graduating class Sylmar High School has ever had, and the school was established sometime in the early 1950s,” said Furumoto, whose program begins working with seventh graders at Olive Vista Middle School and stays with them through the high school years at Sylmar.

Typically, Sylmar graduates about 500 students a year. The class of 2005, representing the first cohort of collaborative program students, had 597 graduates, and the class of 2006, the second cohort to come through the project, has 694 graduates.

Under the aegis of Cal State Northridge’s College of Science and Mathematics, the effort at Sylmar High is part of the federal government’s GEAR UP Partnership Project, whose main objective is to reduce the dropout rate and increase the college-going rate. Furumoto won a 5 year, $7.6 million federal grant to launch the center’s project in 1999.