Frank Hernandez’ devotion to Middle College High School (MCHS) at Contra Costa College (CCC) in San Pablo, California, soars beyond his professional commitment. Growing up in the surrounding blue collar neighborhood, known for its shipyard and oil refineries, Hernandez attended this community college just north of Berkeley in the early 1960s. After earning his B.A. at San Francisco State University, he returned to Contra Costa, whose aura of a “ poor minority school” at times contrasted sharply to the white suburban image and facilities of two other local community colleges.

Hernandez began working as a counselor, determined to show students they had opportunities to succeed in the world beyond. He particularly wanted to provide a role model to the growing number of Latino students on campus.

“I felt it was a real responsibility to show students that there were alternatives beyond the city limits,” says Hernandez, now dean of Contra Costa and liaison to its Middle College High School.

When that possibility took shape in 1989 in the form of a proposed MCHS at Contra Costa, Hernandez jumped in enthusiastically. But he was not the only one to greet with excitement this effort—sponsored by the Ford Foundation—to replicate the LaGuardia MCHS model in New York City. Similarly strong bonds to the community abound among Contra Costa staff. As a result, the college has an extremely high commitment to its middle college high school, which in turn has resulted in unusually close integration of the two institutions.

“The community college commitment to its MCHS is extremely high, and they’ve probably had the highest level of collaboration” of all the middle colleges to date, says Cee Cee Cunningham, director of the Middle College National Consortium. The new and redesigned institutions in the Early College High School Initiative (see accompanying story), she adds, are emulating that close cooperation.

In some instances, Contra Costa and MCHS collaborate so closely that the two institutions seem fused. MCHS students who want to work on their yearbook, for example, do so in a graphics course taught by a Contra Costa instructor. Similarly, the 25 students on the high school’s two-year-old robotics team take the college’s Computer Science 101: Robotics alongside MCHS’ Principles of Technology course. Contra Costa students in the computer science class mentor the high schoolers, who build a robot from scratch in six weeks, and then enter it into competition with robots built by other high school teams.

Key to this snug integration of MCHS and Contra Costa is the requirement that every MCHS student take a community college course each semester. As a result, MCHS has the highest percentage of community college courses passed by students of any middle college, says Cunningham. In the 2001-2002 school year, MCHS students passed 99 percent of their Contra Costa courses. In comparison, only 40 percent of the 6,000 students at all middle colleges took community college courses, and they passed only 80 percent of them.

Contra Costa faculty and MCHS teachers teach some courses collaboratively. For example, as part of the American Social History Project, created by the Middle College National Consortium, college instructor Carolyn Hodge teaches African-American history in conjunction with MCHS’s Adolph “Bert” Bertero, who teaches U.S. history.

That means, for example, that Bertero might supply historical perspective or detail during Hodge’s classes. “If I’m at a period of history—say the Treaty of Paris in 1763—I’ll look over to him, and he’ll tell me who was fighting whom,” explains Hodge.

A large measure of shared governance accompanies this academic blending. Appointed as liaison between the college and the high school soon after the middle college’s somewhat shaky launch, Hernandez insisted on bringing middle college staff on to the college’s Academic Senate Council. Today, MCHS counselor Emilie Wilson reports to that council on the middle college every month. A joint MCHS/CCC Advisory committee also discusses middle college issues regularly. It makes recommendations on MCHS admissions decisions, and is currently refining the school’s admissions criteria. (MCHS received 300 applications for 70 places for its 2003 entering class.)

In addition, MCHS staff take part in the college’s academic senate; the high school’s nine teachers may attend college academic department meetings. And principal Gary Carlone attends the college’s council of department chairs.

Such tight linkages have apparently borne fruit. It’s not only that 50 of the 53 MCHS 2003 graduates went on to two- or four-year colleges (three went into the military) and that eight also received AA degrees. But in 2003, MCHS students also achieved the highest standardized state test scores in the West Contra Costa Unified School District: an average of 783 (out of a possible 1,000) on the state’s Academic Performance Index (API). Though such high test scores rouse accusations of “cherry picking” the district’s best students for admission, MCHS—like LaGuardia MCHS—admits mainly students who have good potential but aren’t performing well. “We look for the middle performing student—not low-low or high-high—though we do take some of each,” explains Carlone.

Today, MCHS’ and Contra Costa’s sharing of space and facilities, while not unusual among middle colleges, is readily apparent on a green and relatively compact California campus, as compared to an east coast campus whose buildings may be separated by city streets, as they are at LaGuardia. Carlone’s office is one floor below the college president’s, and MCHS students have access to the entire Contra Costa campus, including classrooms, laboratories, library and media center. “We are part of the campus,” says Carlone. “Our students are part of the college.”

Former MCHS principal Myra Silverman’s familiarity with the school district (she’s a 20-year veteran) enabled her to iron out a number of problems faced by MCHS at its inception. She obtained teacher preparation periods, for example, and even managed to change the MCHS calendar to fit in with the community college year.“She was really good at working her system to get stuff,” recalls Hernandez. “She had been in the district and was connected. She knew supporters of the project.”

Thorough mingling of MCHS and Contra Costa also gives MCHS students organizational and job experiences, while supplying the college with needed services. For example, the MCHS Leadership Class runs the campus-wide recycling program, and keeps the college’s bulletin boards up-to-date. Club members usher at graduation, and set up events like Career Day or Martin Luther King’s birthday. Says MCHS student Avestro, “We’re learning to become mature and handle ourselves in situations.”

Not that all is rosy at MCHS: in addition to the state budget crisis and resulting cuts in community college and school district funding, recent legislation prevents the majority of MCHS students from taking physical education and summer school courses at Contra Costa. The quantity of community college credits MCHS students can take in one year without paying has also been reduced. In January, Contra Costa was put on the state’s fiscal watch list.

But if Carolyn Hodge has her way, the MCHS students will be around for a long time to come. While admitting they can be more boisterous than the older community college students, Hodges says, “I love them. They have a lot of energy. They are always more upbeat than my regular college students. They do real quality work—sometimes better than my regular students. They go the extra mile. I really like that enthusiasm.”