Natalia Torres already graduated once this spring: Two weeks ago, she collected a pair of associate degrees from Oxnard College.
But it was Friday’s high school graduation that hit home.
“It all happened in the blink of an eye,” said the 17-year-old, one of 33 Oxnard Middle College High School students who walked in the school’s first-ever graduation Friday afternoon at Oxnard College’s performing arts center.
More than 80% of the high school’s class of 2022 earned associate degrees or completed general education certifications as part of a dual-enrollment partnership between Oxnard College and the Oxnard Union High School District that launched in 2018.
For Torres, that means two years of time and tuition she doesn’t have to worry about when she starts studying aerospace engineering at UCLA in the fall. It also gives her a two-year head start toward helping launch astronauts to space.
“My plan is to send people to Mars,” she said.
Middle colleges are becoming an increasingly popular way to give high school students an opportunity for free college credit while boosting community college enrollment.
Rica Coria, the school’s academic counselor, said the program was an “empowering” opportunity at free college education for the area’s underserved communities.
More than 80% of the student body is Latino and more than half qualified for free and reduced meals last year, according to state data.
Moorpark College has hosted a middle college — the High School at Moorpark College — for two decades, though it didn’t begin accepting freshmen until 2019. Ventura College offers dual enrollment to high schoolers.
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Oxnard Middle College High is unassuming — an array of portables parked on a corner of the college campus — but students spend a third of their class time in college classrooms anyway, starting as soon as the summer after their eighth-grade year.
Dual enrollment allows each student access to all community college facilities and services along with the high school’s services.
The school enrolls just under 160 students. The staff tries to offer traditional on-campus extracurricular activities, and students can also join teams and clubs at other high schools.
Elias Valdivia, a 17-year-old student on track to wrap his bachelor’s degree at Boise State University by the age of 19, said the worst part of his experience at the school is having to leave it.
“It’s like a family,” he said. “Everyone knows each other.”
Jamie Scholl, who joined as Oxnard Middle College’s first math teacher in 2018, said it was “surreal” to watch the class she’d taught for four years take their next steps.
It was amazing “to see how they’ve grown and blossomed and come into their own,” she said. “We were all guinea pigs together.”
Isaiah Murtaugh covers education for the Ventura County Star. He can be reached at isaiah.murtaugh@vcstar.com.