Fourteen high school students from Cesar Chavez Charter High School for Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and a few of their parents, will travel to Ithaca, N.Y., to meet with a group of urban planning students and their professors at Cornell University

Aug. 9-12. It promises to be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Irasema Salcido, principal of Cesar Chavez Charter High School, hopes that by being exposed at the beginning of their high school years to an urban planning program at an Ivy League campus, some of the Cesar Chavez students will make places like Cornell a goal to aspire to. "We want our students to see that there's a place for them in higher education," said Salcido, who has developed a rigorous program at Cesar Chavez expressly to help minority students in the D.C. area go on to college.

But Salcido's ambitious vision for the school is broader than that. She wants "to develop young people who will make our country a better place by influencing public policies that affect their communities." She believes so strongly in that vision that she has incorporated it on the school's letterhead. She hopes that the partnership with Cornell will lead to community betterment.

The students, who were chosen for their academic performance, will attend special classes at the Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning on topics related to public policy and planning, including a workshop in which computer mapping is used to re-envision an urban neighborhood.

"It's a mutually beneficial endeavor as well as an empowerment exercise," said Kate Carpenter, a second-year graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) within the college. "CRP students are committed to connecting with urban centers, particularly depressed areas," she says. "The Cesar Chavez students who live in those areas can help us better understand the issues affecting their neighborhoods so we can work together to strengthen them."

Piquing the students' interest in urban planning should be beneficial to CRP programs at places like Cornell. Many have had difficulty recruiting minority members who grew up in distressed neighborhoods. "We need more students with urban backgrounds," said Carpenter.

Cornell alumna Karina Ricks, who earned a master's degree in regional planning in 1998 and is now a program analyst with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., volunteers at Cesar Chavez and introduced Salcido to the Cornell planners. She will accompany the high schoolers to Cornell and intends to bring with her portfolios produced by another group of Cesar Chavez students. That group spent three weeks this summer doing what real planners do: looking at their neighborhoods with fresh eyes, cataloging signs of urban decay, such as how many stores were boarded up, and proposing ways to improve the picture, such as persuading a much-needed supermarket to locate there. The project was sponsored by D.C.'s Cesar Chavez Summer Youth Employment Program, and the students were paid for their efforts.

"They learned about red-lining, housing discrimination and migration patterns and interviewed family members and long-time residents on why they moved to those neighborhoods and how the environment has changed," Ricks said. "It should be exciting for the Cornell urban planning students to learn how these young urban residents envision their neighborhoods."

The visiting high schoolers, who are mostly black and Hispanic, will take part during their stay in a session on how to go to college, led by Reginald Ryder, who manages minority student recruitment for Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning. The session, which will also be attended by the parents in the group, will touch on financial aid possibilities as well as what it takes to get admitted.

At Cornell the students and their parents will be the guests of Telluride House, a residence for exceptional Cornell students, and they will get to meet and talk with some of them. Telluride, whose most renowned resident was Franklin D. Roosevelt's labor secretary Frances Perkins, donated four days of room and board to the group of visitors.