Author: By Beth Daley, Doreen Iudica Vigue and Kate Zernike, Globe Staff

Date: TUESDAY, February 9, 1999

Page: B2

Section: Metro

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It's a problem that stumps almost every college or university: How to increase diversity on campus when affirmative action is under attack?

But now, to Boston via New York, comes a diversity initiative even conservatives could love.

Since 1989, the Posse Foundation has taken students from New York City public high schools and provided them full scholarships to a host of schools: DePauw, Vanderbilt, and Brandeis universities, and most recently, Middlebury College. This fall, the program arrives in Boston, with the help of a federal grant.

Giving scholarships might not be so original. What matters here is how they give the scholarships.

Students are grouped into 10-member "posses," which meet over a period of several months before they leave for college, becoming essentially families. The idea is that a group can help individual members avoid the pitfalls that prompt many students to drop out in their freshman year, and can serve as an example of cross-racial friendships. Once on campus, the group widens to include new friends each posse member meets, until ultimately the posse grows into a large multicultural cluster. In this way, posses foster multiculturalism, but don't force it unnaturally.

The goal of the Posse program is the same as many affirmative action programs -- to produce classrooms, and ultimately board rooms, that look like America.

But the Posse Foundation avoids the tactics that are increasingly dooming affirmative action programs in the courts. The program is not race-based or income-based. Students are chosen on merit. They are all city kids, but they are white, black, Hispanic, daughters of doctors, and sons of sanitation workers.

They are chosen by guidance counselors working with the individual universities, who are seeking ambition and self-confidence as much as SAT scores.

Students apply early-decision to the schools, then spend two hours weekly for the final semester of their senior year and the summer with their posse peers, in training programs that include academic preparation, workshops on time management, and leadership training.

The posses continue to meet weekly once they go off to college, giving each member someone to fall back on for problems with grades, homesickness, peer pressure, or money -- factors that make many students drop out.

"It's a foundation," said Natalee Graham, an 18-year-old freshman at Brandeis who was recruited by the Posse program at Franklin Lane High School in Queens. "Many people aren't sure they have true friends when they come to college, but this becomes like a family. You have different types of kids, but we all need the same thing. We're all going to college for the same time, it's new to everybody no matter where you come from."

To the individual members, the posse is most important in the weeks after arriving on campus.

"It was like dinner for a week until we met our own friends," Graham said. "You had a nest before you were able to fly."

Michael Ainslie, a former president of Sotheby's, began the posse program in response to New York City students leaving for college only to return six months later. One casually commented that if he had his posse -- then the current slang for a group of friends -- he wouldn't have dropped out.

Since 1989, the program has given scholarships to 175 students. Among those students, 92 percent have graduated within five years, a rate far higher than most colleges can boast.

But the posse program doesn't just help students, it helps the campus. For the rest of the school, the posses become examples of how students from different backgrounds can find common ground.

When Graham arrived at Brandeis, she said, school clubs tended to be distinct by ethnicity or race. Now, she said, the groups have begun to open up.

At a "posse plus" retreat this past weekend, each of the 10 posse members took three or four of their new, non-posse friends on a retreat to Cape Cod, where they talked about the school and its future.

"We explained the whole posse concept to them, it made them feel good, and a lot of them came back really enthusiastic about spreading posse love to everyone," Graham said. "It's contagious."

The teleconference, organized by teacher Kate Bresnahan with the help of the PictureTel Co. in Andover, will feature Antarctic explorer and scientist Dave Bresnahan (no relation) explaining his work on the icy continent.

Dave Bresnahan, who heads the group Polar Exploration, sponsored by the National Science Foundation in Virginia, has been working with the Sargent School for six years, after receiving an envelope of handwritten letters that first-graders had sent to Antarctica and addressed to him by name only. The package took months to get to him and he was so impressed with the many canceled stamps on it from around the world, he contacted the school and has been corresponding with Kate Bresnahan's classes ever since.

ZERNIK;09/28 CAWLEY;02/09,06:38 LESSON09