The rest of South County's middle and high schools got the invitation 4½ years ago when the Sweetwater Union High School District and San Diego State started the Compact for Success.

The compact is a six-year college preparation program. Because San Ysidro alone among South County communities does not send its children to Sweetwater middle schools, it was not included in the original compact. In 1974, by a vote of 419-246, San Ysidro voters approved a proposition to withdraw its seventh-and eighth-graders from Sweetwater and keep them in the San Ysidro School District for middle school.

Yesterday, Sweetwater Superintendent Ed Brand and San Diego State President Stephen Weber signed an amendment to add San Ysidro High to the compact during a rally in the gymnasium before the school's 1,750 students.

The belated invitation comes in time for San Ysidro students to join the first class of Sweetwater graduates – this year's juniors – eligible for guaranteed admission.

San Ysidro High opened in 2002 with ninth-graders only. It added 10th grade last school year and 11th-graders in summer.

Although Sweetwater and San Ysidro district officials are still talking about beefing up San Ysidro's middle school curriculum, Brand and Weber have decided through the amendment that San Ysidro High students shouldn't be excluded from the compact because they didn't have the chance to attend a Sweetwater middle school.

Weber said the compact is part of San Diego State's commitment to having a diverse student population. About 70 percent of Sweetwater's 40,000 students are Latino.

"These students are our priority," Weber said. "That's why we made the compact with them."

Though they weren't officially included until yesterday, San Ysidro High students are familiar with the compact, and several said they were particularly pleased that it has a financial aid component.

"A lot of people don't expect students from San Ysidro to go to college, and this is a way to show them we can get there," said sophomore Kevin Maule, 15.

San Diego State received 48,000 applications for admission for 7,600 available slots for the 2005-06 school year. Sweetwater graduates about 5,000 students a year. Fewer than 300 of them enrolled at San Diego State in the fall, said Gonzalo Rojas, the university's compact administrator.

Brand said that as the Sweetwater district grows and more students meet the compact's requirements, he hopes to flood San Diego State with South County high school graduates.

"By about 2010 and 2011, I want every student at San Diego State to come from the Sweetwater district," Brand told the students at the rally.

San Diego State has hesitated to include San Ysidro students in part because university administrators want to see stable leadership in the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade San Ysidro district, which has had four superintendents in the past three years.

Sweetwater has set up an education foundation to raise scholarship money for compact students. So far, it has raised $2.6 million, including a recent appropriation of $540,000 from Congress. U.S. Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego, requested the money. Filner said he turned down reserved seats at the presidential inauguration to attend the San Ysidro High rally. He said he intends to renew the request annually with the aim of eventually securing $5 million in federal funding for the compact.