Jacquelyn Molina wakes up every weekday morning at 7 a.m. in her Rose Park apartment, and helps two of her siblings get ready for school.
She walks with them to North Star Elementary, trying to beat the 8:15 a.m. tardy bell.
One day, she will try to beat traffic before walking into the Social and Behavioral Science Building at the University of Utah, or so hopes U President Bernie Machen.
He is currently working on the West Side Initiative that will help students like Molina come to the U.
The initiative will allow the U to appropriate money for scholarships and set up an office to address west-side community issues.
The geographical focus of the initiative includes the area west of State Street to the mountains and between 2100 South and Davis County.
While Machen develops the initiative, Molina is studying math, social studies and science in Margaret Burke’s sixth-grade class.
“We’re studying rockets, stars and planets in science, and we just got done studying Egypt in social studies. Now we’re studying ancient Rome, but I liked Egypt better,” she said.
During lunch, she overhears snippets of conversation in English, Spanish, French, Japanese and Samoan. She speaks to most of her friends in Spanish as they walk around the soccer fields and talk at recess.
Talking is something Molina is good at, especially talking to solve problems, which she wants to do for a living.
She hopes to become a psychologist when she grows up.
“I want to help people,” she said. In order to do that, she realizes she has to get an advanced degree.
“I want to go to college because it’s an important part of life,” Molina continued. “You can’t really get a job [without it].”
Machen is trying to help students like Molina reach the career of their choice by getting an education at the U. He also hopes to help solve some of the daily problems unique to the west side.
“There is a perceptual divide between the rich east side and the multicultural west side,” Machen said.
Machen spoke with the late Sen. Pete Suazo about the U’s lack of involvement with the west side, something Machen plans to change. His initiative will help west-side students make a college education financially feasible.
“Many residents on the west side have no capacity to pay for school,” he said.
Salt Lake City is also working on its own West Side Initiative, but plans to collaborate with the U, said Mayor Rocky Anderson.
He hopes the U will get west side students to go to college.
“We’re working on a program to identify students who wouldn’t form a goal of higher education and tell them if they’ll utilize a mentor or tutor, maintain their GPA and remain drug-free, they’ll have academic money waiting for them,” Anderson said.
However, Machen wants to not only provide financial support for these residents to go to school, but also to help in areas of daily life as well.
“Some tentative ideas include after-school reading programs, health care, drug prevention and day care,” he said. “But before we begin prescribing, we want to know the community’s feelings.”
In order to figure out what the community wants, Machen has appointed Irene Fisher, former director of the Bennion Community Service Center, as his special assistant for campus community partnerships.
“I appointed Irene to be an ambassador to the west side because she doesn’t tell communities what to do, but asks them, and then finds places to partner,” Machen said.
Machen and Fisher began discussing the possibility of a west-side community outreach office during an informal conversation one day last spring, and the initiative evolved from there.
Machen has given Fisher one year to set up the community office.
Fisher hopes to have a physical location on the west side by April, and she wants to work with a group of people who “get things done but don’t get in the way,” she said.
“I want to work with people who value cooperation rather than competition,” she said.
She is currently in the information-gathering stages of the project.
She has asked about what partnerships exist between the campus and the west side and what interests and concerns residents have.
Many of the issues that have arisen include a lack of respect for diversity, AIDS/HIV education and prevention, prostitution around Jackson Elementary, crime and lack of child care.
“I don’t have any real solid ideas for solving these yet, but I have many tentative ones,” Fisher said.
One program she hopes to instigate is an empowerment model for west-side residents.
“I have an inkling of an idea for community leadership development for youth and adults,” Fisher said. “I want to develop a group of racially diverse students from grades 7 to 12 and create peer adviser positions. Then I want to have the participants learn about how the city works.”
Fisher previously served as executive director of Utah Issues, an organization that addresses poverty and tries to solve the resulting problems.
“Salt Lake is really a collection of many small, somewhat- interconnected communities, but they’re not as interconnected as they could be,” she said.
The interconnection of schools such as North Star Elementary has provided a model for Fisher to follow.
For the 11-year-old Molina, the goal of going to college was instilled not only by her mother, but also by the teachers and education system at North Star.
The school has a unique community-oriented system. The classrooms are divided into communities, and each community has one class from each grade level.
The communities include trust, caring, respect and responsibility.
The community of family houses the kindergartners and the administrators reside in the community of support.
“Every community has its own student council and constitution,” Principal Rosanne Henderson said. “The students do activities together, and then we have town meetings every other Friday.”
Everyone gathers to discuss any problems within the school or one of the school themes. The themes include personal voice, problem-solving and community service.
The students learn about themselves and each other through theme-related activities. This kind of teamwork and community involvement is what Fisher hopes to facilitate throughout the west side.
Fisher wants to interconnect the communities found in Salt Lake, so she has spent “a lot” of time visiting with people.
“I have spoken to west-side community council chairs, people in the school system, directors of non-profit organizations and regular folks like you and me to gather ideas,” she said.
Fisher isn’t the only one doing a lot of talking.
Machen has spoken to Anderson about the U’s involvement in the city’s West Side Initiative.
Anderson is working to help business development, but is also strongly focusing on helping the youth.
“I’ve had discussions with President Machen about including a mentoring and scholarship component,” he said. “We need to increase education for the segment of the population where the goal of higher education is not instilled in kids.”
Anderson is excited about Fisher’s appointment.
“I’ve known of her work at the Bennion Center, I’m very pleased to know she’s helping out with this west-side project,” he said.
Like the U, city officials have a strong commitment to diversity, and the West Side Initiative is part of it.
“[The West Side Initiative] will bring about a major shift, in commitment to both that geographical part of our city and also minority populations generally,” Anderson said.