BUZZ, buzz, buzz goes the chatter in Westport and Greenwich, Darien and New Canaan, Fairfield and Wilton and in other bastions of affluence -- urban, suburban, exurban and beyond.

At Dwight, with its families from Puerto Rico, Somalia and Albania, Bosnia, Guyana and Vietnam -- from 24 countries and speaking 14 languages -- virtually all the families live below the poverty line, and 80 percent of the students live in a home where a language other than English is spoken.

So in a world where education helps define the divide between rich and poor, it was no small triumph when 12 yellow buses rolled onto the immaculate green campus of Central Connecticut State University about 9:30 a.m. Friday, and some 530 kids from Dwight bounded off in white T-shirts emblazoned with the year in which they plan to start college.

BUZZ, buzz, buzz goes the chatter in Westport and Greenwich, Darien and New Canaan, Fairfield and Wilton and in other bastions of affluence -- urban, suburban, exurban and beyond.

Which senior got into which college? Who made a mistake by not applying early or applying early to the wrong school?

It's the background noise of the world where college admissions chatter is part of the air people breathe, where tragedy redefined is the student who had his heart set on Yale but ended up at Wesleyan.

This is not the buzz at Dwight Elementary School in what is anachronistically known at Little Italy in the South End of Hartford.

At Dwight, with its families from Puerto Rico, Somalia and Albania, Bosnia, Guyana and Vietnam -- from 24 countries and speaking 14 languages -- virtually all the families live below the poverty line, and 80 percent of the students live in a home where a language other than English is spoken.

This in a district where 20 percent of the children drop out around the ninth grade, where only 49 percent of last year's 790 high school graduates went on to college, most of them to two-year schools. Parents tend to work two or three jobs. Prestige college decals for the rear window of the Lexus are not a burning concern.

So in a world where education helps define the divide between rich and poor, it was no small triumph when 12 yellow buses rolled onto the immaculate green campus of Central Connecticut State University about 9:30 a.m. Friday, and some 530 kids from Dwight bounded off in white T-shirts emblazoned with the year in which they plan to start college.

There was Amela Fejzic, who wants to be a doctor, and her pal Andrea Gomez, who wants to be a chef. Cynthia Sukhraj wants to play basketball at UConn, but if that falls through she might want to be a chef, too. (''I watch TV a lot and got into the whole cooking thing.'')

Grabiel Santiago wants to be a boxer, Marlon Vasquez a teacher, Joshua Washington a rapper.

They're all lucky to be in a school -- the best-performing one in Hartford -- where the idea is to give them the same aspirations as their more comfortable peers in the 'burbs.

''It's important to go to college so you can get a good job,'' explained Coraima Quiles, over a lunch of pizza, an apple, carrots and milk, served on a proper blue tablecloth. ''You need to get a good job, so you don't end up a bum on the streets.''

Dwight's trip to Central Connecticut, its second, was part of a partnership between the two institutions -- one of 100 partnerships across the nation engineered by the Foundation for Excellent Schools, a nonprofit group based in Vermont that is trying to bridge the chasm between the educational opportunities for the rich and for the poor.

In the past, said Dwight's principal, Kathleen Greider, college for her students was a hazy, distant concept, usually evoked as a place their parents might drive at night to take a course at Capital Community College.

''They usually thought of it as something you did after you had children,'' she said. ''When they were exposed to a college campus, learned that you could live on campus, that it could be fun, it opened up a whole new world.''

So on Friday they took part in a dance program and drum circles, saw ''Seussical: The Musical,'' gawked at the modest campus water garden and the quite amazing self-flushing toilets.

Timothy Perez, who in third grade has it all figured out, was struck by the freedom of it all: to study what you wanted, when you wanted -- engineering, the universe -- that you could make friends as he had with his Bosnian pal, Adam, that you could sleep all day if you wanted, though you wouldn't because you'd miss too much class.

SOME parents came, too, like Parry Alleyne, a 27-year-old single father of three and a cook at a nursing home. They attended a session on helping their kids attend college and figuring out how to pay for it, even if the savings began with $1 and $5 deposits to a college fund. And when all the parents arrived at Founders Hall, they were asked to stand up and give themselves a hand, which they did.

After three hours the parents and students all piled into the buses back to Dwight, a neat brick school with a banner outside reading, ''Best students, best teachers, best parents, best school.''

On a bulletin board were college essays that students had written, including one by a first grader, Jamie Lonnie Cooper Jr., who said he wanted to be an astronaut.

''I want to see the moon,'' it concluded. ''I want to be happy.''