Joseph Thornton could have been another statistic.
As a sixth grader living in San Francisco with a single father who worked nights, he was on his own a lot of the time, cooking dinners and getting himself to bed.
But his public school teacher spotted his unusual work ethic and "through a blessing and good luck" introduced him to a private school in East Palo Alto, where he could live in a dorm and get round-the-clock support.
Thornton today is a Stanford University freshman, working at the tech help desk in the undergraduate library, singing in the Black Men's Chorus a cappella group and preparing to declare a major in computer science.
Though he always aspired to attend college and his father supported the dream, Thornton says without the extraordinary preparation he got in his six years as a student at Eastside College Preparatory School, things might have turned out very differently.
"It definitely wouldn't have been the same -- I would have been on my own in the whole process," he said.
Now in its 18th year, Eastside Prep is a one-of-a-kind institution, combining rigorous academics, an uncommon level of teacher and volunteer support and sustained investment by private donors toward a razor-sharp objective: getting first-generation college students to succeed in four-year colleges and beyond.
"We believe every student who becomes the first member of his or her family to go to college has a profound impact not just on that student but on the whole family," says Principal and co-founder Chris Bischof.
Starting with that conviction and little else, Bischof and Eastside co-founder and Vice-Principal Helen Kim -- friends from their Stanford undergraduate days in the early 1990s -- have built this unusual school from scratch, learning and adapting along the way.
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