GSE alumni Chris Bischof and Helen Kim's Eastside Prep in East Palo Alto has an extraordinary record of educating students and preparing them for college.
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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