Blacks Grapple With School Crisis : Southeast Ministers, Educators Seek Parent Involvement

While Principal Anita Calhoun was busy Thursday trying to cope with the daily problems of black students at Martin Luther King Elementary School, less than a block away black religious leaders and city school officials unveiled plans to talk about the same problems--termed by many a crisis--to Southeast San Diego parishioners on Sunday.

“The community has to get serious about what is happening to our young people,” the Rev. Ellis Casson of the Bethel AME Church told a news conference in announcing the second annual Education Sunday. School officials--teachers, administrators and others--will fan out to more than 20 black churches to try to talk parents into spending more time with their children’s educational problems.

Parents will be exhorted to spend time checking on homework, getting their children to school on time every day, meeting and working with teachers, and helping stem the epidemic of drug abuse in the area.

The checklist of positive steps that the churches will distribute Sunday struck a responsive chord with Calhoun. She has been at the fore of efforts for more than a year to improve the tone and substance at the heavily minority King school.

“Parent involvement is so very important, but realistically, it is (harder) to accomplish when many are low-income and must spend their time and energy on simply survival: food and shelter,” Calhoun said.

Calhoun has established a parent booster club for the school that meets once a month and is open to all parents. Club members have tutored children, raised funds for uniforms for the school’s drill team, and spent a day last month sprucing up the campus.

The booster club is a complement to a special parent and staff council that reviews school programs monthly as a requirement for receiving special state and federal education funds. There is no official Parent-Teacher Assn. (PTA) group at King or most other Southeast schools, the PTA long ago having been seen as irrelevant by area parents.

“It was hard to get parents to come (when the booster club first started),” Calhoun said. “But we’ve publicized it and have started to get more coming.

“Every parent has something to offer. They all care about their kids and they have high expectations for their children. They want the best programs for kids. But they don’t understand the (intricacies) of curriculum and many don’t feel comfortable in a school environment since many may have had bad experiences themselves with school. Until we got a sufficient number of bilingual people, we had a language problem with Hispanic parents.

“We try and get them to support our homework policy--we require homework of our students--and we now have an honor roll and a study skills program to show kids and parents how to organize the best way for results.”

Calhoun cautions that results from the school’s efforts will be fully known only after years of perseverance, when elementary school graduates boost performance measurements at the junior and senior-high school levels. She is working with the principal at nearby Memorial Junior High School on a program to reduce dropouts.

“I see the Crips (gang) members and (they) motivate me and the school to not give up, to pursue drug education, to give our kids successful experiences so things will be different for them later,” she said.

“For all of us, expectations have got to be raised.”

The ministers and school officials sponsoring Education Sunday want to push on a wider scale the efforts of Calhoun and her teachers, almost all of whom asked to teach at King this year.

“We face a crisis today in public education that is critical for black children,” the Rev. George Walker Smith, who served 16 years on the Board of Education during the 1960s and 1970s, said Thursday. Referring to a recent report that showed almost half of all black high school seniors with D averages, Smith took both parents and the community to task for “giving less than a hoot” about their children’s future.

Smith said that even during his childhood in rural Alabama, when segregation was the law and many parents could neither read nor write, ill-funded black school committees moved mountains to obtain hand-me-down books so their offspring might escape to a better life.

“There’s something missing today: parents, church and community folk, and teachers who care about students,” Smith said. “You have to have something up here (pointing to his head) rather than music plugs in here (pointing to his ears).”

Walter Kudumu, who directs Education Sunday as a concerned parent, decried any “throw-in-the-towel attitude” and urged parents to find out how their students pick their courses, to talk with counselors, to express their hopes and expectations. “And front-line school administrators must have an open-door policy toward parents to welcome them,” Kudumu said.

“Our children are not dumb or stupid,” the Rev. Marshall Sharpe of Phillips Temple CME Church emphasized. “But they need to channel their intelligence to be productive for them and society.”

The first Education Sunday last year increased awareness among many parents and guardians that schools cannot succeed without their help, Casson said. Southeast Presbyterian Church set up tutorials at night among its young adult group, complete with refreshments, the Rev. Leon Bracey said.

“It made all principals as well more aware to reach out to parents, not just wait for parents to come to schools,” Dorothy Smith, school board vice president, said.

“The black parent needs to make more than just an average commitment because the black student faces more barriers,” Smith said. “Until 25 years ago, black kids were shut out physically (from schools) and today, while classes are integrated, the children may still be shunted aside academically.

“The black home and church must assert itself. Maybe you can’t change the drugs out there on the street, but you can give a kid more support to counter (drugs) and other pressures.”