When Dustin Dacuan attended Renton High School, he participated in the University of Washington’s Dream Project, which helped him get into the college.

His parents didn’t know how to navigate the higher education system. Dacuan’s father has a college degree but is an immigrant from the Philippines. His mother is from Eastern Washington but did not pursue college.

The Dream Project offered Dacuan a mentor with knowledge about accessing resources for college and gave him a scholarship to attend UW.

Last Friday, Dacuan was back at Renton High with about 100 college student mentors offering help to the high school’s senior class.

The Dream Project seeks to help first generation and low-income high school students achieve the dream of going on to some form of higher education.

When it started at Renton High five years ago, the project partnered between 30 to 70 high school students with college student mentors.

With the help of a grant from the Gates Foundation, the Dream Project has now expanded its outreach to the entire Renton High senior class.

That’s about 270 high school students.

When Dacuan was going to Renton High School, he remembers encountering a lot of students who didn’t see college as an option for them.

“Seeing that continue to persist in our own backyard in King County, that’s one of the things that really motivates me to keep coming back,” said Dacuan. “Now that I’ve been given all this knowledge about how to access higher education and how to find those resources, I want to make sure other students have that opportunity as well.”

He is one of the 500 UW students enrolled in the Dream Project course, Education 360, at the university.

Many of the college mentors are pursuing degrees in education like Dacuan, but a lot of them also come from an array of majors.

Although the Dream Project focuses on first generation, low-income, minority and sometimes English Language Learning students, it is not to be confused with the Dream Act.

The latter is a proposal in Congress that would provide citizenship to those undocumented students who pursue higher education or military service.

The Dream Project is currently at 16 high schools in Washington and the course exists at the UW Bothell campus and Colorado State University.

And, it is successful.

The project is changing the college-going population from 53 percent of their targeted group to 84 percent.

This year will be a new challenge with Renton High School being the first to get assistance for the entire senior class. That decision to expand was a component of their saturation efforts with the Gates Foundation grant.

“Programs are great, but really what makes this work is that it’s the people in it and the leadership within the University of Washington project that have been great,” said Damien Pattenaude, Renton’s principal. “And they’ve been critical to the success here and that was a big decision as to why we decided to expand.”

Renton, along with Chief Sealth and Foster High schools, were originally picked by the Dream Project when it started. Schools were identified because they had a population with a higher percentage of underrepresented minority students and 50 percent with free or reduced school lunch.

As part of the Gates grant, the project will be evaluated for its effectiveness.

Calvin Chan, who is a senior at Renton High School, said the project has been really helpful to him. On Friday he was looking up scholarship information with mentors.

“They’re just really helpful, they pour their heart into this,” Chan said.

He’s been accepted at Seattle University and plans to study civil engineering or biology. Neither of his parents went to college.

Dustin Ducuan wins Wilson fellowship

One of Renton’s own has won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for teaching.

Dustin Dacuan is one of the 25 fellows in the Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund for Aspiring Teachers of Color for 2012.

The fellows were chosen through a competitive national selection process. They will receive a $30,000 stipend to complete a master’s degree in education, preparation to teach in a high-need public school, support throughout a three-year teaching commitment and guidance toward teaching certification.

Dacuan is a senior international studies major at the University of Washington. He is a researcher on immigration and education, a volunteer with the literacy project with the Paschal Sherman Indian School and a mentor and leader with the UW’s Dream Project. The Dream Project helps first-generation and low-income students navigate the college admissions process.

Dacuan graduated from Renton High School in 2008.

“The Foundation is pleased to add this impressive group of young and promising teachers to its national network of outstanding teachers and scholars,” said Bill Dandridge, program officer and director of the WW-RBF Fellowships for Aspiring Teachers of Color in a release.