MLK Center hosts first college fair

City Council members Anissa Moore and Len Torres met Stephanie Espina, the director of freshman admissions at Adelphi University.

Ben Strack/Herald

A variety of local colleges attended the fair to answer the questions of students and parents.

Ben Strack/Herald

City Council President Len Torres, right, and Martin Luther King Center Board Chair James Hodge, center, greeted attendees at the facility’s first college fair on Feb. 18.

Courtesy City of Long Beach

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Long Beach’s Martin Luther King Center held its first college fair on Feb. 18, part of a broader effort by the city to implement economic empowerment programs in the North Park neighborhood.

The event, organized by community activist Marcus Tinker, was geared toward North Park residents and gave high school students and their parents a chance to meet with representatives from a variety of schools, including Adelphi, Ithaca, Hofstra and the City University of New York.

“It was actually a great opportunity to learn about the colleges, what they have to offer, the tuition and all that,” said Andrew Buskey, a Long beach resident and sophomore at Lawrence-Woodmere Academy. “This is something that should definitely happen again because it’s great for the community. Especially with kids around here so they can understand and know what is going on with all these colleges; it gives them hope for the future.”

Following the town’s job fair last September, also hosted by the MLK Center, Tinker said he came up with the idea to hold a college fair for students in the area. He reached out to Patricia Baron, a guidance counselor at Long Beach High School, for university contacts and invited as many institutions as possible.

“The goal was to show [students] the different opportunities for them after high school,” Tinker said. “It makes the selection process a little easier by showing the students what different places can offer them.”

The fair represented the facility’s longtime value of academics. Thomas Patrick, who graduated Long Beach High School in 2013, started coming to the Riverside Boulevard facility at age five. He recalled playing sports in the gym that now, years later, hosted colleges for the first time in the center’s 49-year history.

“They always told you that education was first,” Patrick said. “Upstairs they had the classrooms, so before you come to the gym you go upstairs and make sure your homework was done…or take a test and then come down to play. It was always education before recreation.”