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S.D. nonprofit helps La Jolla’s Preuss School students build bridges to their future
A Bridge for Kids offers resources and sponsorships to students from low-income households hoping to land at their dream colleges
A Bridge for Kids provides services including financial sponsorships, tutoring and college campus tours. (A Bridge for Kids)
By Noah Lyons | noah.lyons@lajollalight.com | The San Diego Union-Tribune
PUBLISHED: July 7, 2025 at 9:00 AM PDT
Sabrina Haji just started her first semester at Yale University studying history of science, medicine and public health. Before that, the oldest of six children from an immigrant household attended The Preuss School in La Jolla from sixth to 12th grade.
She is among the students who have been helped by A Bridge for Kids, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization that is making bold educational opportunities like Yale a reality for students from low-income families, many of them from The Preuss School on the campus of UC San Diego.
Haji was connected with A Bridge for Kids in her freshman year of high school at Preuss, a charter middle and high school for low-income students striving to be the first in their families to graduate from college. She said the daunting process of applying to colleges was manageable thanks to her sponsor, Nghi Dang.
Dang, a Preuss School alumni from the class of 2016 who now works in the public health field, not only sponsored Haji but also mentored her.
“She was able to navigate me through a lot because she had knowledge on what it was like to attend a school as academically rigorous as Preuss,” Haji said. “She was someone I was able to lean on a lot.”
A Bridge for Kids was founded in 2012 to provide resources and funding to help youths from lower-income families get accepted to and thrive in college.
Students selected for the program are offered many services, from college campus tours and financial sponsorships to tutoring and SAT or ACT exam preparation. To be eligible, students must be considered low-income, live in San Diego and be a teenager in the year they apply.
A Bridge for Kids founder and Chief Executive Michael Nance said the organization works with students from many schools across San Diego and that Preuss is “by far the largest school we support.”
Preuss boasts a student acceptance rate at four-year colleges and universities of more than 90%.
“The first student we ever sponsored was from Preuss, the 1,000th student we sponsored a couple of months ago was from Preuss, and they have been far and away the school that we sponsor the most students from,” Nance said.
“Preuss is great … because they’ve introduced us to seventh- and eighth-graders,” Nance added. “We’ve found that the kids we’ve had for three years get a lot more benefit than two, and the kids we’ve had for four or five years get a lot more benefits than kids we’ve had for three.”
A Bridge for Kids has grown exponentially in scope in its 13 years, much of that recently, thanks to large donations from the community, Nance said.
“Over the last two years we’ve doubled in size,” he said. “We [had] 100 students getting admitted in the program in 2023, and our goal this year — which we are well on pace to do — is 200.”
A Bridge for Kids alumni have attended high-profile universities including Princeton, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to Yale.
The nonprofit sponsored a college tour for Haji up the Southern California coast to UCLA, USC and UC Irvine, but she ultimately was drawn to Yale in New Haven, Conn., after attending its “Bulldog Days,” when admitted students are invited to peruse the campus.
Before Haji applied to college, she took advantage of A Bridge for Kids’ SAT preparatory course, used sponsorship money to buy new shoes for track and field and purchased a plane ticket to Barcelona, Spain, for one of her two sessions studying abroad.
Landing at Yale, she said, was “very surreal” and put her a step closer to her goal of working in public health policy as a career.
“One thing that stood out to me [about Yale] was that everyone … was very happy and they had very positive energy,” Haji said. “Also, I could see that the institution puts a lot of money toward the arts, as well as different areas that were important to me.”
A Bridge for Kids’ website shares success stories of several other students, including one who was part of Wesleyan’s class of 2021, one who is set to graduate from UC Irvine in 2026 and one who just graduated from UC San Diego’s School of Engineering.
Then there are Mayerling and Valerie Colin, a pair of sisters and Preuss School graduates whom Nance described as “the poster kids for A Bridge for Kids,” though he added “I can probably say that for a lot of students.”
The Colins, who came from a single-parent home close to the poverty line, both were accepted into Yale, years apart.
Nance said Mayerling was at every event and college tour she could attend and took full advantage of A Bridge for Kids’ programs. Valerie, who long has had a hearing disability, followed suit and “worked her butt off” to get into Yale, Nance said.
The sisters could not immediately be reached for comment.