Carol Alexander, director of LA Unified’s A-G Intervention and Support

As part of College Awareness Month in October, LA Unified officials on Tuesday presented a new initiative designed to inspire and prepare the district’s students for college, starting at the pre-K and kindergarten level and continuing every year through 12th grade.

“The Division of Instruction wanted to begin a dialogue of specific activities by grade level, highlighting an activity by grade level that every child by grade level would have,” Carol Alexander, director of LA Unified’s A-G Intervention and Support, told the school board’s Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee.

The plan is one of several ways the district is looking to increase college awareness this month. Others include a new instructional video on the A through G graduation standards, which will be shown to students, and a personalized brochure that can be given to high school students on A-G in their native language. The district is also promoting upcoming college fairs, as well as partnering with Cash for College on upcoming workshops for parents and students on how to apply for financial aid.

The pre-K through 12th-grade plan isn’t required for schools but is a list of “suggested activities” that have been sent out to each school, Alexander said, and leaders at each site will decide how best to implement them. The activities include kindergarten students investigating and learning about different careers, researching a college or university in 5th grade, learning about the A-G course requirements and how to calculate their GPA in 8th grade and writing college essays in 10th grade.

Members of the school board on the committee reacted positively to the overall plan and added some suggestions of their own on how to get the district’s kids interested in and ready for college.

“I think every student should take a college-level class. Every high school student has a mandate to graduate,” said board member Richard Vladovic, who chairs the committee. “Back in 1963 — even if it has to be over television — I took from community college, Harbor College, an astronomy class over TV. And earned a grade. I took it. So we can do it, there are vehicles to do it.”

Alexander also played a six-minute video produced by the district about the A-G graduation requirements that will be shown to students. The standards, which were required for graduation for the first time last school year, call on students to take and pass a series of courses that would make them eligible for admission to California’s public universities if they earn all C grades or better, although D’s are allowed for graduation. The video featured a series of graphics and a voiceover highlighting the various classes students need to pass to qualify for graduation.

Board President Steve Zimmer offered what he called a “gentle critique” when he said the video could perhaps use a little more excitement.

“As I was watching the video, I was reminded a little bit and it felt a little bit like I was strapped into my airplane seat and I was watching the safety video of like — very important information, but I’m worried that people kind of tune it out,” Zimmer said.

Zimmer then recounted a time he flew on Virgin America and was surprised the company had produced a video that was so entertaining “you can’t help but watch it.”

College and Career Awareness month comes as the district enters the second year of its new A-G standards, and with the recent news that LA Unified broke its graduation record last school year. It also comes on the heels of the August announcement of the Los Angeles College Promise, in which every district graduate starting in 2017 will be offered a free year of tuition at any Los Angeles Community College District campus.

For the four months or so between confirming college acceptance and arriving on campus for the first semester, these teenagers are confronted with an increasingly complicated set of tasks that they must complete in order to enroll as college freshmen. There is complex paperwork to fill out. There are numbers to crunch. Many students find themselves realizing, for the first time, just how much getting their degree is going to cost.

And since most of this happens during summer vacation, the teachers and guidance counselors who coached them all through the college admissions process are no longer available to help. Their entire lives are about to change, and they find themselves without the support network that backed them up all through high school.

It’s enough to break 10 percent to 40 percent of students, according to a study from Harvard University. Rather than fighting through it, they give up. They melt away.

Educators call this phenomenon “summer melt,” when students who have committed to attending a college suddenly change their minds. It is most prevalent among students who planned to attend community college, and the majority are from low-income families, according to the Harvard study.

It’s not that these students lack ambition for higher education. It’s that the preparation is simply overwhelming.

The paperwork is monumental, especially for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). It requires tax and financial information that many students have never dealt with before, and those who are the first in their families to be accepted to college don’t have their parents’ experience to fall back on. Some students come from families who are undocumented and don’t have tax forms. Some don’t realize the differences between loans, grants, and scholarships until they’re presented with a bill over the summer. Some work full-time jobs and don’t have time for setting up email accounts, dorm assignments, food plans and class registrations.

“It speaks to this gap in institutional support transferring from high school to college,” said Joel Snyder, a social studies teacher at Green Dot Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School in South LA. “You could have a guidance counselor in high school, but even the most amazing ones can’t track all those students as they go on to college.”

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that each year some 2 million students typically enroll in college immediately following their high school graduation. This means hundreds of thousands of students are likely melting away over the summer. And the problem may soon get even worse, as the NCES projects that college enrollment is set to spike 14 percent over the next decade.

Supporting all those soon-to-be freshmen will be extremely challenging—but the Harvard study reported that interventions at the institutional level “can have a significant impact on alleviating the summer melt phenomenon and increasing college enrollment rates.”

That’s why Snyder has helped develop intervention plans with other California Green Dot charters to address their schools’ melt rate, which hovers around 20 percent. One of these interventions is a launch-to-college event in April that brings alumni, college representatives and financial aid officers together to meet and encourage supportive transitions from high school to college. Snyder is also developing three alumni events throughout the school year to bring high school grads back and connect them with internship opportunities.

At KIPP Houston—which currently sees a 5 percent to 10 percent summer melt rate—a seven-member alumni team assists recent graduates of its charter high schools. KIPP Through College Director Bryan Contreras said each team member has a cohort of high school grads; they text, call and email their advisees at least once a week over the summer to make sure they’re submitting forms and to see if they have any questions about the process. The team also holds summer bridge activities that get advisers and students together to navigate health forms, financial aid awards and other paperwork.

Contreras said one student unexpectedly told him this summer that he was switching from a college in Pennsylvania to one in Minnesota because he was worried he couldn’t afford the tuition. This last-minute, $65,000 decision, as Contreras put it, was made without the student talking to an adviser. Contreras encouraged the student to meet with his team so they could work on finding the best financial package together.

“We see this as a baton race,” Contreras said. “This is the final leg. Students are fearful of change, so we hope to coach them through that.”

In New York City, the public school system recruits college students to work with recent graduates of 100 city high schools throughout the summer, mentoring them and encouraging persistence toward matriculation. Other intervention efforts involve additional preparation for school counselors and outreach to families. Some 1,700 high school counselors have gone through summer melt training, the NYC Department of Education reported. The department also tries to instill a college-going mindset in parents and students early, with informational college nights starting in middle school.

While alumni are often the touchpoints for students, teachers sometimes take on that responsibility. Halley Curtis, an English teacher at Hudson High School of Learning Technologies in Manhattan, advises a group of six seniors in her homeroom throughout the school year. Curtis has sat with students on speakerphone with the IRS trying to untangle tax information for FAFSA. She’s taken students on college campus tours, visited their homes to help with paperwork and texted them to remind them about deadlines.

Curtis says she wishes she’d earned an accounting degree in addition to her master’s in education. She’s only half-joking.

Her six advisees all applied to college, and four will be attending this fall. The two who won’t got stuck on FAFSA forms, she said, but she’s still helping them aim for a January starting date.

For all the work Curtis sees her fellow teachers and school counselors put in, she said, she gets frustrated that it’s not enough.

“It’s not a good enough answer to have a teacher advocate because it takes so much from the teacher, and I don’t think teachers can do that sort of thing long term when teaching,” she said.

It’s a constant anxiety in teachers’ minds that no matter how much they try to help their students make the leap, sometimes it just isn’t enough.

“I would be fearful every time an [alum] would come back to visit because they might say they weren’t in college,” Snyder said.

This story was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

The schools involved in the grant are Berendo Middle School, the Helen Bernstein Complex, Le Conte Middle School, the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools Complex, West Adams Preparatory High School and Young Oak Kim Academy.

The grant comes from the Department of Education’s Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), which will provide the students with tutoring, counseling, financial aid and campus visits, and track them through their first year of college, according to the story.

“Preparing our students for college is a priority for this district,” LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy told City News Service. “The GEAR UP program targets youngsters from low-income families who would be the first-generation college graduates.”

This is the second GEAR UP grant to LA Unified, which was also awarded $21 million to benefit 4,000 students in 2011.