New SRJC official aims to make college more accessible

Pedro Avila knows firsthand the challenges immigrant and first-generation college students face.

The newly hired Santa Rosa Junior College assistant superintendent and student services vice president was 9 years old when he and his family left Guadalajara, Mexico. They settled in Castroville, a farming community in Salinas Valley, where as a child he worked in the fields alongside his family.

“I grew up picking strawberries,” said Avila, 42.

It was the same backbreaking work that his father did under the Bracero program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers into this country on short-term labor contracts during World War II and over two subsequent decades. His father left the fields after suffering injuries in a car accident when Avila was a teen. Using settlement money, the family purchased a small video store, where he and his two siblings worked before going to Fresno State University.

Avila has spent much of his career in higher education, seeking to make college more accessible to underserved populations, including the children of farmworkers. While employed at colleges in the San Joaquin Valley, he reached out to local high schools, developing programs that made it easier for them to register for classes.

“The Central Valley has a low college-going rate. It also has a high unemployment rate,” said Avila, who wants to afford students the same support he found while at Fresno State, where he received bachelor’s degrees in business administration and Latino studies in 1997.

“His story is very much like many of our students,” said Frank Chong, SRJC president. “He will be a role model for many of those students.”

After graduating from Fresno State, where he met his wife, Jeanette, Avila went to work for Grundfos, a pump manufacturer.

The job paid well, said Avila, who handled marketing. After his company moved its sales and customer services operations to the Midwest, he also was able to pursue while working full-time a master’s degree in business administration at Rockhurst University, a Jesuit and liberal arts school in Kansas City, Missouri.

The private sector had its perks but Avila said it wasn’t his “calling.”

“I wanted to do something that had a greater impact on society,” Avila said, sitting in his office on the second floor of SRJC’s Bertolini Student Center.

In late 2002, he left the company, returned to California and took on a marketing job at Coalinga’s West Hills College, a campus with a high number of low-income, first-generation and Latino students.

“That’s a population I felt I could relate to,” said Avila, who has two daughters, ages 7 and 8.

Avila worked his way up to vice president of student services and helped launch a priority registration program for high school seniors, which led to a 35 percent increase in college enrollment among that population. He said the state looked to their program as a model for other community colleges in the state.

He then took a job with State Center Community College District, where he eventually became an associate vice chancellor. In his three years there, he helped boost student enrollment by 13 percent, among the highest growth rates in the state, according to SRJC officials.

“He truly has the students’ best interest in mind,” Chong said. “He is intelligent and innovative. I’m excited about his energy and ideas.”

Avila joined the SRJC administration in January. His job pays $179,000 annually.

He said he was looking for a place to set down roots for his family when he came across the job in Santa Rosa. He also wanted to return to students services, where he can make the greatest difference in making college “more accessible for everyone.”

You can reach Staff Writer Eloísa Ruano González at 707-521-5458 or eloisa.gonzalez@pressdemocrat.com.