By R.M. SMITH
De Anza College wants Sunnyvale citizens to know that the Cupertino school is committed to serving their community--and officials have the numbers to prove it.
During a luncheon held on campus March 8 for Leadership Sunnyvale, a leadership-training organization for adults that visited the college and three other area schools as part of a group "education day," De Anza president Martha Kanter relayed a battery of statistics to back up this point.
According to school calculations, Kanter said, one of every six students who attends De Anza comes from Sunnyvale. Since the community college opened in 1967 the school has served nearly 600,000 students, and more than 103,000 were from Sunnyvale, she said.
Given that the city of Sunnyvale's population is about 126,000, this means that 82 percent of current residents would have been De Anza students at some point in the past 30 years, she said.
So it comes as no surprise that, of the six communities De Anza is chartered to serve--Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View and Palo Alto--Sunnyvale supplies De Anza with the greatest number of students, followed by its home-base, Cupertino.
Kanter also pointed out that 31 percent of the students who graduate from Fremont Union High School District and attend college choose De Anza. This compares with 18 percent of FUHSD graduates who attend University of California schools and 9 percent who enroll in the California State University system, she said.
"Many students come for two-year degrees. Others take general-education courses to transfer," Kanter said.
De Anza provides its students with college-credit courses for degree or certificate programs; vocational training or retraining; and transfer programs for students who aspire to four-year academic degrees.
In addition to these general offerings, Kanter said, De Anza operates several programs in partnership with the city of Sunnyvale and its organizations.
These include an accredited child-development program with two courses funded by Sunnyvale Child Care Advisory Board; a teaching internship program at San Miguel Elementary School; an after-school Art and Schools program at San Miguel, Lakewood and Vargas elementary schools, held in cooperation with De Anza's Euphrat Gallery; Middle College, a program that helps 100 at-risk students at Fremont High School finish their secondary education and get a head start on college; and an Older Adult Studies program for students 50 years old and older.
Terri O'Connor, De Anza's director of marketing and communications and a member of Leadership Sunnyvale, said it was the broad scope of these programs that most impressed the 30 or so leadership trainees who attended the luncheon.
"The people that I talked to after the meeting were so surprised at the wide variety of partnerships that we have with Sunnyvale--everything literally from cradle to senior citizenship," O'Connor said. "They didn't see De Anza as their community college, but I think they really understand that it is now."
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, March 13, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.