The California Community Colleges Board of Governors gave De Anza College’s First Year Experience program an honorable mention Jan. 10 for its success in helping first-year students.

FYE recruits first-generation college students and enrolls them in courses that are tightly coordinated. According to the Board of Governors press release, FYE student success was 84 percent, eight points higher than De Anza’s average.

“We know we’re doing a good thing and it was nice to be acknowledged,” said Ulysses Pichon, FYE co-coordinator. “It would have been nicer if we got a little cash to go along with it.”

Pichon said many students arrive lacking fundamental student skills and FYE teaches “those basic things that somehow people have to learn and then they buy into in order to be successful students.”

Jesus Ruelas completed FYE and is in his second year at De Anza. Ruelas, now 25, had been out of school for seven years and said that without the program he “would have been lost.”

Ruelas is studying administration of justice and wants to transfer to a four-year school to earn his bachelor’s degree, a change of plans brought about by FYE instructors.

“I’d tell them I just wanted my A.A. and they were like, ‘no way, you got to reach higher than that, you can go to university,'” Pichon said.

Jean Miller and Patricia Guitron Burgos founded FYE in 2007. When Burgos heard of the honor, she said, “I was excited, and it just felt like all this hard work was validated.”

FYE’s tight integration of courses requires instructors to hold weekly meetings with each other — extra hours that are uncompensated. Pichon, who taught for 34 years before moving to an administrator role, said teacher burnout was an issue at FYE.

“You just keep doing what you know you need to do in these programs,” Pichon said, “and after a while you can’t get up in the morning.”

Both Pichon and Burgos said the program is trying to recruit more faculty to allow current FYE instructors to rotate out and be given time off.

Despite the planned budget reductions at De Anza, Pichon said FYE is “stable” but added that funding constraints create barriers for extra activities such as field trips.

Programs from Cosumnes and Santa Ana colleges won the 2011 Exemplary Programs awards, which included a cash prize, while FYE and Norco College’s Step Ahead program received honorable mentions.