It’s a few months before she’ll graduate from Newark Memorial High School and Allison Dinsmore doesn’t have a plan for what will happen after that.

Unlike students in the far wealthier cities and towns surrounding hers, she wasn’t prodded since birth by her parents to prepare for college. No one in her family has ever gotten a degree. She never took the ACT or SAT.

It’s largely the same story among Dinsmore’s friends, with whom she hangs out most days around a blue metal picnic table in the high school’s asphalt courtyard. Just under half the students here are considered poor, more than half are Hispanic and few of their parents have degrees.

Those are exactly the characteristics of the high school students least likely to go to college. It’s not that they have less potential than their counterparts in predominantly white, more affluent communities. What they lack is college-educated relatives, counselors, role models or mentors to make sure they take the courses and meet the deadlines they need to, or who encourage them to think about their further educations ...

Newark Memorial does have one thing most high schools don’t: Silicon Valley. And some local entrepreneurs, backed by advisors from nearby Stanford University and elsewhere, think technology can help to solve this problem.

Those entrepreneurs have created a platform, and company, called Siembra — a Spanish word for sowing seeds — that reaches out to low-income, first-generation and racial and ethnic minority high school students on their ever-present smartphones, nagging them to stay on track the same way college-educated parents of wealthier kids do.

Read the full article about Silicon Valley's efforts to help low-income kids go beyond high school by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.