San Diego to Study Apathy : Get Involved in Schools, PTA Chief Tells Parents

Ann Kahn, president of the 5.8-million-member National PTA, Wednesday urged parents in large urban school districts to reverse their historically low involvement in their children’s schools and educations.

Kahn, who was in town as part of a San Diego-based program to study the issue, said PTA leaders remain puzzled as to why big-city parents are not active in schools. There is not a single PTA chapter in the New York City or Philadelphia schools, she said.

Poverty is not a factor because the PTA enjoys strong support in poor, rural areas, Kahn said. And the percentage of working mothers is about as high in the suburbs as it is in the city, she said.

“City life in the larger cities is extremely competitive and much faster-paced,” Kahn said. “The idea of parents playing a role just doesn’t come as naturally as in other areas, where parents assume that if their children are going to have an education, they’re going to have a hand in it.”

Research shows that parental participation strengthens schools and improves student learning.

Kahn added that city parents may also be turned off by numerous partisan political groups that organize in urban schools to promote political agendas instead of improve education.

To combat the problem, the National PTA has developed a “Big-City Project,” which in January awarded San Diego’s PTA a $4,000 grant to study reasons why some parents here resist involvement in local schools. San Diego and Milwaukee won grants in a competition that included 20 cities with populations of more than 500,000.

Dubbed Project HOPE (Harness Our Parents’ Energy), the San Diego project will survey parents of children at Dewey and Central elementary schools--where there are no PTAs--to determine why they are not active in the schools and to ask how schools and PTAs can assist them. A conference held at O’Farrell School of Creative and Performing Arts on Wednesday and today is part of the project.

PTA leaders also will work with 40 community organizations to promote parental involvement in schools and send informational materials and videotapes to parents.

Information gleaned from the San Diego and Milwaukee programs will be applied in cities across the nation, Kahn said.

Although the program is not targeted at minorities, it will involve many groups representing the growing minority population in San Diego city schools, said Sallie Cadwallader, president of the 9th District PTA, which includes San Diego and Imperial counties.

“Our concern is not whether they are minorities or not minorities,” Kahn said. “It is that those big cities begin to involve those parents in their schools.”

San Diego was chosen because of the large number of children who speak English as a second language. Milwaukee represents industrial cities where fading tax bases are causing financial troubles for the schools, she said.