Under the Social Justice Education Project, she and her classmates looked at issues of social injustice and what they could do to fix problems at Cholla.

In the process, they transformed the school and their lives - and even improved their scores on the AIMS test.

Sixteen of the 17 graduated. Sixty-five percent went on to college. Nationally, only 13 percent of Latinos ever make it that far.

Twice a week, the students gathered in a windowless, dust-covered trailer on the south side of the campus at 2001 W. Starr Pass Blvd. and compared notes about social justice issues in their community.

They started with the collapsing ceilings and empty bookshelves of their run-down, cash- strapped school.

By the end of the year, the students had not only documented the problems, but they had also successfully pushed the administration to carry out a series of improvements, including a refurbished, brightly painted gym, sparkling new bathrooms and functioning water fountains.

"The project showed us that instead of being angry, you could have a voice and be an advocate for yourself and your little brothers and sisters and for your community and for Tucson and for Cholla," said Dominguez, who had had to drop out of school once before to take care of her four younger siblings while her mother worked.

Dominguez, now 20, was the first in her Mexican-American and Anglo family to graduate from high school. She's now a student at Pima College and teaches in the program part time, passing what she learned to a new generation of students.

The program began in 2003 as a collaboration between then-newly appointed University of Arizona education professor Julio Cammarota and the director of Mexican-American/Raza Studies for Tucson Unified School District, Augustine Romero.

The project supplements 12th-grade government classes with a research component two days a week, where Cammarota and Dominguez teach graduate-level social science research skills, such as taking field notes and conducting interviews, along with heavy doses of reading and writing poetry.

The poetry isn't traditional social science, "but it's not traditional to have young people do research, either," Cammarota said. "You have to understand we're pushing the envelope in terms of social science research, and we have to because if we went about it in very traditional ways, I don't think we'd be successful at all."

Judging by recently released results from the AIMS test, along with other courses offered by the Mexican-American/Raza Studies program, the project is a success, even by the most traditional standards.

Students enrolled in Mexican-American/Raza Studies classes significantly outperformed their classmates in the latest round of Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, said Tucson Unified School District statistician Rick Haan.

On average, 11th-graders in Mexican-American/Raza Studies classes improved 250 percent more than their classmates in reading, 380 percent more in writing and 400 percent more in math.

The Social Justice Education Project is based on the philosophy of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. His basic idea was to engage and educate marginalized populations by having them study social injustices in their communities.

For the mostly lower-income Latino kids at Cholla, those include poverty, racism and media stereotypes that peg the boys as criminals and girls as sex objects.

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