For Santa Ana’s Latinos, the Issue Is Getting Voice on School Board

With a school district population that is nearly three-fourths Latino, two Mexican-American challengers are hoping to become the first Latino trustees in almost a decade to win a seat on the Santa Ana Unified School District Board.

The two challengers, Emilio De La Cruz and Louisa Pedroza Solis, who have pledged to improve Santa Ana’s high dropout rate, are seeking to unseat conservatives Mary J. Pryer and James A. Richards in the Nov. 5 election.

While the 36,290-student district is facing severe overcrowding, among other problems, it has been a desire among many community residents, teachers and some school officials to elect a Latino to the board.

“The issue in Santa Ana is when are we going to have Mexican-American representatives on the board?” acknowledged James Ward, a board trustee, who has endorsed Solis and Robert B. Palmer, a retired Santa Ana police lieutenant with an extensive background in community involvement, over De La Cruz.

Last Latino in 1978

The last Mexican-American to sit on the board was Cordelia Gutierrez, who resigned in 1978.

Among the challengers for the two seats to be filled, Palmer, 57, seems ahead after winning major endorsements from Board President Joan Wilkinson, trustee Sadie Reid, who is black and the only ethnic trustee, and Ward. The same three trustees constitute a voting bloc that is viewed as liberal, which more than often counters the opinions of Pryer and Richards.

For any of the challengers to win, however, they must defeat Mary Pryer, who has been a trustee almost 14 years and is perennially the school district’s most successful vote getter.

Joking at a recent candidates’ forum, Pryer, who was asked why she was running, said: “I don’t know. I’ve been running so long it’s become a habit, I guess.”

Through the years, Pryer as been the major architect for the school district’s back-to-basics movement, which has resulted in establishing three fundamental schools. She has helped discontinue “educational experimenting,” such as schools without walls. Also, her vote helped fire a superintendent who was sympathetic to the school district’s minority needs, and helped terminate a breakfast program for needy children.

Pryer’s voting strength is predominately with Anglo parents whose children attend the district’s three fundamental schools, which stress discipline in basic academics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Enrollment is optional, and parents must provide transportation. About 2,255 children, including some blacks and Latinos, are in a fundamental program. The majority, about 34,000 students, are enrolled in the school district’s traditional or special-education schools.

“We’ve had remarkable results with the success of the fundamental schools,” Pryer said during a recent candidates’ night.

She said parents’ motivation has been “overwhelming,” a factor she hopes to encourage throughout the district. If reelected she will push for the expansion of fundamental schools with the possible addition of a fundamental high school, she said.

Worried About Overcrowding

But supporters of Pryer and Richards, who are running as a slate, are getting anxious. Especially when the issue is overcrowding.

“We want to know where our kids are going to be going next year!” declared Charlotte Houghtaling, a worried mother with a child enrolled at Muir Fundamental School. Santa Ana, which had leased a school from neighboring Tustin Unified to house its fundamental program, now may be forced to find another site because of the possibility the lease will not be extended through 1986-87.

As the district scrambles to find a site for Muir’s 395 students, it already has placed 13 inner-city schools, some with 95% Latino populations and higher, on year-round schedules. While increasing efficiency, year-round scheduling and portable classrooms are considered stopgap measures. The district desperately needs classroom space, and if more is not found, some elementary school populations, now with 900-plus students, could soar to 1,100 in the next few years, school district officials said.

Five more elementary schools are scheduled to be added to a year-round calendar, the board decided last Tuesday. Only five other schools remain on a traditional calendar.

Meanwhile, relations with the Santa Ana City Council, which are at a low ebb, have to be improved, Wilkinson said.

Sentiments ran high after the city filed a lawsuit against the school district’s choice for a new high school site, forcing the district to reconsider and choose another.

Stadium Controversy

A city plan to demolish Eddie West Stadium in favor of building a domed stadium that may house a professional basketball team only further split the school board and city. Three Santa Ana high schools lack athletic facilities and use Eddie West, which is shared by Rancho Santiago Community College, Santa Ana Campus, and Mater Dei, a Catholic high school.

“We don’t have the money to build classrooms, let alone any athletic facilities,” said Anthony Dalessi, Santa Ana assistant superintendent.

Wilkinson and Ward said the candidate who most likely can help patch up the riff is Palmer, who has been endorsed by Santa Ana Mayor Daniel Griset. To help raise construction funds, the school board recently voted to study the feasibility of asking the city for developers’ fees on new construction and redevelopment.

Gail King-Burney, president of the Santa Ana Educators Assn., said the group, which represents 958 of the district’s 1,597 teachers and is searching for “a new approach,” decided recently to endorse De La Cruz and Solis.

‘Need New Blood’

“With Emilio and Louisa, we think that we have people concerned with all students and not a segment or special interest. We need some new blood, a newer approach,” King-Burney said.

Traditionally, Santa Ana Unified has ranked lowest among Orange County school districts in state academic achievement scores while having one of the highest attrition or Latino dropout rates. Although Latino parents have expressed concern, they have not been able to generate interest at the ballot box.

In 1983, an Orange County grand jury report on Santa Ana’s bilingual program found that it was substandard. The report also found that during a 5-year period Latino students in kindergarten through 12th grades accounted for about 65% of the district’s dropouts.

During the years when conservatives represented a voting majority, bilingual education took a back seat to other educational projects, such as fundamental schools. But the number of limited-English-speaking children kept growing. While conservatives and liberals squabble over the merits of English-immersion programs or bilingual education, the number of limited-English-speaking students has grown steadily to more than 13,000.

Minorities Make Up 50%

As an example of the rapid social change, minorities accounted for only 25% of total enrollment in 1968. By 1975, they made up half.

Most of the district’s growth has come from immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. The enrollment last year showed that 69.7% were Latino, 15% were non-Latino whites, 11% were Asian or Pacific Islanders, 4.2% were black and 0.1% were American Indians.

“We need to motivate the parents and our kids and tell them to stress discipline,” Solis said. “We need more communication from the school district to the parents’ homes.”

Ironically, Solis, 36, a mother of three and a school secretary, and De La Cruz, 47, are the only two candidates who favor a form of bilingual education. They both favor some years of classroom instruction in the student’s native language and then a quick transition to English instruction because they believe that limited-English-speaking schoolchildren need instruction in their native language.

None of the other candidates favors that approach.

Favored in 1960s

During the 1960s, bilingual education was favored as a method of allowing limited-English students to compete with those more fluent in English. In the mid-1970s, the district began to limit the amount of bilingual education and emphasized English-immersion or English-as-a-second-language programs, in which non-English-speaking students are taught English as rapidly as possible. Today, Santa Ana schools use a combination of both methods, which Solis and De La Cruz believe should be altered to include more emphasis on bilingual education.

De La Cruz, who coordinates a program for economically disadvantaged students at Rancho Santiago Community College, Santa Ana campus, has also been endorsed by trustee Reid.

In additional to Palmer, Solis and De La Cruz, other candidates are Samuel Nodarse, a Cuban-American Social Security information specialist, and Patsy Campbell, a retired U.S. Navy computer program analyst.