Free College Promise Pushed Entire Valley Class, 1 Named Valedictorian

PHOENIX, AZ — A decade-old promise from charity-minded strangers helped motivate an elementary school class to push through the pandemic, graduate from high school and move on to college. And the promise pushed one of those students to became her high school's valedictorian.

Erika Delgado, 19, was one of 84 members of the Michael Anderson Elementary third grade class who were all promised full college scholarships by the Rosztoczy Foundation 10 years ago. Delgado was the 2021 class valedictorian at Desert Ridge High School and she just finished her first year of college at Grand Canyon University.

Although Delgado is a competitive person and was determined to become the valedictorian after she found out that she was No. 1 in her class, she does not think she would have put so effort in without the promise of a free ride to college.

"I don’t think I would have tried that much," she said. "Why should I spend so much time on school if I’m not going to go to college?"

The Rosztoczy Foundation just a few weeks ago made its second promise to an entire third grade class at Bernard Black Elementary School in Phoenix. Tom Rosztoczy, trustee of the Rosztoczy Foundation, said that Delgado's story was one of the motivators for making the college promise to a second class.

Delgado is a first-generation college student whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico. She's a justice studies major at Grand Canyon University who's been interested in law from a young age, when she started watching crime shows on TV. Delgado plans to become a police officer.

"I’m very grateful," Delgado said of her full-ride scholarship. "It’s kind of just a great opportunity to focus on school and not have to work."

Delgado has seen some of her friends struggle to find a realistic schedule and meet all their responsibilities as they work and go to school. But she doesn't have to worry about that, with extra time to join clubs, talk to professors during office hours and attend events.

Prior to making the college promise to the students at Michael Anderson, Rosztoczy and his wife decided they wanted to provide the same opportunities to low-income students attending Phoenix public schools that they had provided to their own children. Their own kids never had to worry about paying for college, and these students wouldn't either.

"Our thought process here is that if we start young enough, those kids can think about college as a part of growing up, and money's off the table," Rosztoczy said.

At Michael Anderson School, a part of the Avondale Public School District, around 94 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

Students from high-income high schools are about 25 percent more likely to enroll in college immediately after high school than those who attended low-income schools, according to a study from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The study also found that students who attend high schools with a high percentage of low-income students were about half as likely to graduate from college within six year of high school than students who attended low-poverty high schools.

There were 84 students in the third grade Michael Anderson class who received the college promise. The foundation re-upped the promise when the class graduated 8th grade, bringing the total of students promised a scholarship to 100.

The re-upping at 8th grade, which the foundation has promised to continue at Bernard Black, is an incentive for teachers and administrators to ensure the students are meeting certain academic benchmarks as a class. If the class doesn't meet those benchmarks, the students who joined the class after third grade don't get the promise.

To qualify for the scholarships, members of the class must also graduate from a Phoenix area public school. Sixty-seven of them did, and now 34 of them are attending college. That just barely met the foundation's goal of at least 50 percent of the class attending college, but the timing of the pandemic and its impact on the students may have played a part in those numbers.

In 2021, there was a 16 percent decline in transitions from high school to two-year colleges, according to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. The institution also found that transitions to four-year colleges declined 6 percent.

Also in 2021, 37 percent of high school students said they suffered from poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even Delgado struggled, she said. While learning from home during the height of the pandemic, Delgado would do homework in bed and end up falling asleep.

"I got really behind my senior year," she said. "I was struggling to catch up."

But things improved when the students got to return to in-person learning. And Delgado knows that the promise of a free ride to college helped to motivate many of her classmates from Michael Anderson.

"It helped us," Deglado said. "It helped our class a lot, a lot, a lot."

When they got into high school they started putting more effort into academics and getting involved in various clubs, sports and activities to give them a boost when applying to colleges. And they tried to support one another through their struggles, Delgado said.

Near the end of the school year, one of the Michael Anderson students was not on track to graduate, and Delgado and others rallied around him to help him with homework, she said.

For Rosztoczy, hearing stories like Delgado's makes the whole process more than worth it, and motivated him to give another college promise to another class. The promise also had a ripple effect, Rosztoczy said, motivating parents to go back to school and siblings of Michael Anderson students to consider college as an option.

“I can’t imagine a better result,” he said.