A small group of teachers stood in a circle in the University Student Union Ballroom as nearly 300 high school students danced to the pounding of a Native American drum to show appreciation for their instructors’ work.

This was the conclusion to the first Ethnic Studies Conference at California State University, Long Beach on Saturday. The conference brought Long Beach Unified students from six high schools together for a day of workshops, panels and guest speakers.

The Long Beach Ethnic Studies Program debuted this fall to give high school students the opportunity to earn college credit with a weekend ethnic studies class taught on Long Beach high school campuses.

“What we are accomplishing here is a national model that I believe will be played out over the years to come in many other settings,” said Armando Ramos, CSULB lecturer and coordinator of the California Mexico Project. Ramos set up the program with help from the four ethnic studies programs on campus.

Six Long Beach Unified high schools offer two sections of U.S. Diversity and the Ethnic Experience. The program covers Africana, Chicano and Latino, Asian and Asian American and American Indian Studies.

The Ethnic Studies Program began as a proposal by Ramos for a February meeting of Long Beach’s My Brother’s Keeper Community Challenge. President Barack Obama launched My Brother’s Keeper in February to increase collegiate opportunities for Black and Latino young men.

Ramos drafted a proposal for the program soon after and wrote an opinion piece for the Long Beach Press Telegram to gather support. Ramos then received the backing of LBUSD Superintendent Christopher J. Steinhauser to fund the initial 12 classes for around $1.25 million for a launch this past fall. This meant that Ramos and his group had four months to put together the program.

“Nobody believed it; nobody thought it could be done,” Ramos said. “But I ran with it because I believed it was the right time, and when you are given the resources and given the opportunity, you don’t back off. You seize the moment.”

The ethnic studies program was developed over the summer through CSULB’s College of Continuing and Professional Education. When fall rolled around, all that was left was to find out if students were interested.

To promote the course offering, the program set up orientations for students and parents at the six high schools. Ramos said that the first orientation at Cabrillo High School had roughly 500 people attend and necessitated a change of venue from the school’s library to its auditorium.

Each of the successive orientation meetings was nearly as popular, Ramos said. Yet with only around 300 spaces available, priority was given to high school seniors.

“We’ve got different programs going on simultaneously; trying to get highly-talented high school students college-level courses with college-level instructors,” said Terri Yamada, the chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies.

Students will complete the inaugural semester of U.S. Diversity and the Ethnic Experience in early December, but the Ethnic Studies Program is hoping to add more courses for the spring semester focusing on a more specified ethnic studies education.

Ramos said that the long-term goal is to create a minor in ethnic studies and offer enough courses so that high school students could have much of the requirements completed before even entering college.

“Our campus has suddenly become extremely innovative.” Yamada said.

For the students, they were offered an opportunity to make suggestions about how to improve the program. They suggested adding more guest speakers, selecting an even more diverse set of authors and making courses available online for students that work on the weekends.

But when the students were asked if they would be interested in taking another ethnic studies class, an overwhelming majority of the students’ hands shot into the air.