Volunteers Help Win Battle for Literacy : Adults Find Reading a Novel Idea

Sixteen years ago, Joe Saenz graduated from Banning High School. He couldn’t read, so getting through school was a struggle.

He said he cheated quite a bit and knew just enough to get by.

Today, Saenz, 34, is back in class, learning to comprehend the words that he could recite but could not understand when he was at Banning.

Saenz, who is functionally illiterate, is enrolled in a literacy program at the Wilmington branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

After nearly a year of tutoring under Coast Guard Lt. Thomas A. Jarrad, Saenz has raised his reading comprehension from the seventh- to about the 10th-grade level. He has applied for a job using skills that once were beyond his reach. Most important, perhaps, he is confident that he can learn to read and write.

Long Waiting Lists

Saenz is lucky. He is one of about 500 adults who have found spaces in South Bay programs for the illiterate. Waiting lists for these programs are long, and the need is growing, officials say.

The total number of adult illiterates in the South Bay is hard to determine, according to Los Angeles school officials, but they believe the number is in the thousands.

In all, about 1 million adults in Los Angeles County and 2.5 million statewide are considered functionally illiterate, or unable to use basic reading, writing and computing skills in everyday situations, according to California State Library statistics.

In the South Bay, more than 200 people are waiting to join literacy programs, library officials say. City and county libraries and nonprofit groups are trying to offer help, but problems, including a shortage of volunteers, have prevented them from keeping up with demand.

Adult Reading Project

“The problem is more dramatic now,” said Suzanne Johnson, project coordinator for the city library system’s Library Adult Reading Project, one of several state and local programs set up in 1984, when the state launched a program to combat adult illiteracy.

Years ago, she said, “America was primarily a manufacturing country . . . and you could get by without reading skills. But that isn’t true any longer.”

Natural attrition is partly to blame for the shortage of volunteer tutors.

“The tutors and students come for a period of time, and they leave because their lives are tenuous and they have to move,” said Paula Hendrich, president of the South Bay Literacy Council. Her organization has 127 tutors.

Johnson said the Wilmington library program also has lost both tutors and students. “We had 20 active tutor-student pairs and now it has dropped to between 10 and 15,” she said. “We lost some because half have graduated and tutors have relocated.”

63 on Waiting List

The 11 tutors in the county library program in the Carson program are already outnumbered by 32 students. Sixty-three people are on the waiting list there, said Marilee Marrero, literacy coordinator for the Los Angeles County Public Library, which runs programs at 14 branches.

Although literacy programs lack tutors, they have been able to gain funds for textbooks and other materials. About $500,000 from the California Library Services Act has been earmarked for the Los Angeles County and City libraries’ services for adult illiterates.

The federal government’s Adult Basic Education Division and the Los Angeles Unified School District have provided more than $2.5 million for anti-illiteracy and other adult-education programs.

Marrero said county library administrators would like to expand services in the South Bay beyond Carson, which is the only county program in the area.

“Certainly the South Bay is an area that is not being served well right now (by the county), so we may be looking at other areas,” Marrero said. “There are certainly people who need services.”

Her concern is echoed by Johnson, whose city library project operates literacy programs at 10 branches.

Literacy Council Programs

Other adult-illiteracy programs are offered through the South Bay Literacy Council, an affiliate of the nonprofit Laubach Literacy Action Inc., which serves about 200 adult illiterates at community and church centers in Wilmington, Gardena, Hawthorne, Lomita, Rancho Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills Estates, San Pedro and Torrance.

Council volunteers also offer individual tutoring in Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach and Playa del Rey, said council president Hendrich.

In both library and council programs, volunteers must be able to read and write at the 12th-grade level, complete a 12-hour training session and commit themselves to working with a student either long enough to complete a prescribed goal such as learning to fill out a job application, or long enough to teach the student to read and write.

Volunteers work with the students one-on-one. Some volunteers help more than one student.

“A lot of people volunteer because of the immediate reward of helping other people,” said Johnson of the city library project.

She said other tutors sign up because they “want to bring the educational joy that they received when they were learning to read.”

‘Enormous’ Rewards

The excitement of helping an adult learn to read and write makes the rewards “absolutely enormous,” said tutor Doris Erikson. “When you’re explaining something to the student, and he says, ‘Oh yeah,’ . . . sometimes I’m more excited than he is,” she said.

Erikson, 68, a literacy coordinator for the South Bay council, said she decided to become a tutor after seeing statistics on illiteracy in the United States. (A national study estimates there are 23 million functional illiterates in the nation.)

“I was shocked,” Erikson said at the Redondo Beach home of one of her students. “I had no idea there were millions and millions of people who were illiterate.”

Saenz’s tutor Jarrad said he became a tutor after seeing a federal notice at work seeking volunteers. Jarrad, a 38-year-old computer manager, said that when he was in high school he “didn’t learn much either.”

Now, he and Saenz have agreed that they are “going to see it through to the end,” which probably means another six months of hourlong weekly meetings.

Watched Children Read

Saenz, a Long Beach resident, said he began thinking about taking a literacy course after watching his children, ages 11 and 9, learn to read.

“They could read a story, and my daughter could read with a flow,” he said. “But every time I picked up a magazine or a book, my reading would be all broken up.”

He said a friend who was taking a similar class in San Pedro finally persuaded him to enroll.

Saenz said that, at first, his inability to read did not hurt his ability to support his family. “I was always a good provider,” he said, adding that reading was not a requirement for the job he got after high school as a driver for a can company.

But when he was laid off in December, 1984, after 15 years as a driver, Saenz realized that he could do better in the job market if he could read.

Part-Time Longshoreman

After he was laid off, Saenz had to get two jobs--one as a part-time longshoreman and another as a gardener--just to survive.

“I couldn’t express myself well on job applications,” Saenz said. “For instance, when it asked if I had any other skills, I didn’t have the vocabulary (to explain).”

Now, though, he is learning to fill out such applications and he can read short stories.

Saenz is working under the Laubach system, named after the late Frank C. Laubach, an educator and missionary who developed a way to communicate with non-English-speaking tribes that was adapted into a nationwide program to teach adult illiterates to read and write.

Under the system, students learn to recognize letters and vowels, and sound out words.

“Joe went through this like a piece of cake,” Jarrad said.

Begin With Stories

Students then begin to read short stories. Later, they learn grammar and sentence construction, and start to read longer, more complicated stories. At the end of the course, students broaden their vocabularies and learn to fill out job applications and write resumes.

Erikson’s Redondo Beach student, a 29-year-old man who asked that his name not be used, said that, like Saenz, his reading comprehension skills are poor. In high school, he said, teachers and other students ridiculed his inability to smoothly pronounce words and sentences.

“I got tired of getting laughed at by people in my class,” he said, adding that he was never really interested in school and was constantly skipping classes or “smoking pot and drinking.”

“I think my mom spent more time at school (speaking with administrators) than I did,” he said.

He dropped out during his junior year.

Confuses Sounds

Now, though, “we’re discovering why he can’t spell, “ Erikson said. “It’s the way he perceives sounds. For example, he has confused the letters A and E and as a result he is not able to differentiate between lag and leg. “

Today, Erikson’s student is learning to strengthen his reading and writing skills and hopes to become a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy.

Meanwhile, Saenz is studying for his second try at getting a groundskeeping job with the Long Beach Unified School District. In September, he filled out his first application for the position, but misspellings on a written test hurt him.

Saenz says he will be ready when the next groundskeeping job opens up, probably in January. He said he is studying harder for the written test this time.

“My children see daddy with homework; everybody has homework,” Saenz said. “My daughter, she’s all straight A’s. If she can do it and she’s only 9, and I’m 34, then I can do it, too. You’re never too old to learn.”

LITERACY CLASSES

Agency Telephone Number L.A. City Library, Wilmington Branch 750-3573 L.A. County Library, Carson Branch 830-0901 Los Angeles Unified School District 62-LEARN South Bay Literacy Council 618-5880