Since the seventh grade, Yair Alvarez, a senior at Starmount High School, has been a member of Juntos Para una Mejor Educación, which translates to Together for a Better Education. Juntos began in 2007 as an NC State-led program to combat high school dropout rates in Latino communities.
“Juntos helped me to keep up with my grades and my attendance,” Alvarez said. “Sometimes I’d be late to school and get silent lunch. I’d be late all the time and some of my friends would be like, ‘Hey, come to school on time.’”
Juntos is now a 4-H program that has expanded to four counties—Yadkin, Wake, Orange and Wayne—and focuses on promoting higher education among Latino youth. Alvarez is a testament of Juntos’ commitment to improving students’ academic achievement.
“They would tell me to take honors classes, and I’d be like, ‘It’s going to be too hard,’ but at the end it was worth it. I started studying more and, at the end, I’d be getting 96 in most of the classes, and in honors,” Alvarez said.
This past Saturday, Juntos partnered with NC State’s Mi Familia to bring in a combined group of nearly 100 Hispanic students and their parents for their second Juntos Family Day.
The day began with workshops at Millbrook High School for the parents and the students on the college application and preparation process. The event then moved to NC State, where the students were led on a scavenger hunt and participated in a video contest. Parents were led on a tour through main campus, which included a look inside Owen Residence Hall.
“We wanted to bring in both the parents and students, because a lot of events that we do is mainly oriented toward the students, so this is our only event in the year that we involve the parents as well,” said Carlo Zanelli, a first-year graduate student studying economics and co-coordinator for Saturday’s event.
“We wanted to let them know that it’s not only possible for them, for their students to go to college, but also that it’s a safe place to be, so we mentioned the blue lights to let them know that they’d be well taken care of,” Zanelli said.
One of the tour’s main focuses was the dorms, a part that the parents really seemed to enjoy.
“They were really into it,” Zanelli said. “Our parent tour went over an hour because they were asking questions, which was good.”
Juan Cruz, a father of children in middle school and high school, found the event particularly helpful.
“From learning what life is like on campus from the moment they start their day to when they go to sleep, to the type of dorm that they have, what the class structure is like, and how they register for classes, everything was very helpful,” Cruz said. “It makes it much easier, and even more so after hearing the parents on the panel.”
For the students, knowing that their parents had become more acquainted with the university system and the process of applying to colleges was a huge relief and helped inform them about the attainability of attending a university.
“My favorite part [about today] is that my parents were able to come to a university like this, to look into what I could actually be into,” Alvarez said. “It’s a dream that they didn’t know that could come true.”
