SAN LEANDRO — Minority students in the San Leandro Unified School District — particularly African Americans and Latinos — will now have a better shot at getting into college because of a $3 million federal grant the district received this week, school officials said.

The school district, which applied for the money in February, was one of 20 throughout the country to receive the GEAR UP — or Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs — grant.

The grant is part of a six-year initiative to provide extensive professional development and academic support to seventh-grade students in the district's two middle schools, John Muir and Bancroft. The program will follow the students through high school, with the goal of better preparing them for higher education.

The district has been working to close the achievement gap for black and Latino students, Schools Superintendent Christine Lim said, and has been making steady progress through the Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, programs at Muir and Bancroft.

With the GEAR UP grant, the AVID program will now be able to provide a broader array of services to these students, officials said. Additionally, the grant will help fund after-school programs, professional development for teachers, community partnerships and visits to college campuses.

Muir and San Leandro High School have each been named AVID national demonstration

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schools, and Lim said 95 percent of the AVID students at San Leandro High have gone on to attend a four-year university.

But limited resources, she said, had stifled the district's efforts to make the AVID program successful at both Muir and Bancroft.

To be eligible for the GEAR UP grant, school districts had to partner with at least one university and two other organizations. San Leandro Unified partnered with both the University of California's Early Academic Outreach Program and Chabot College.