Educating Mom, Dad : Home-Visit Programs Help Latino Parents Teach Value of School

With four children in Oceanside elementary schools and a fifth headed for class in a couple of years, Adolpho Gallegos knew he had a big stake in the educational system even before he applied for residency under the immigration amnesty program.

But until he became involved this year in a parent project under the district’s migrant-education program, Gallegos had no idea how to help his children leap the additional hurdles they face in school as non-native English speakers and as students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds.

“I didn’t know what was going on in school with my children,” he said the other day. “I just took them to school and that was it. And (my wife Andreana and I) were thinking that schools weren’t so good because we didn’t see much progress.”

Hope for Future

Now, after periodic home visits from Oceanside teachers and regular parent meetings put on by various specialists, Gallegos has a lot more interest--and hope--for the future of his offspring.

“We now can guide the kids better,” he said. “Andreana comes home early one day a week to talk with teachers, and we ask the kids specific things about school. And the kids have responded positively. . .and they are speaking much more English and talking to other kids at school.

“We identify with the children much more now. . . Before, I think we thought mostly about adult problems.”

The experiences of the Gallegos family represent the best that Oceanside school administrators hope for under their academic home-visit program that now covers more than 200 migrant Latino families.

And their program symbolizes the efforts being made throughout San Diego County as educators try to involve more Latino parents--many of them recent immigrants--in the public school system. Countywide, Latino students compose 23.2% of total enrollment, up from 16% a decade ago.

The percentage is expected to approach 30% during the next 20 years. Already, Latino students are a majority in many South Bay districts, including National City at 62% and Sweetwater at 51%.

The National City district has begun offering for free up to three years of parent training and child development to any family with a newborn eligible for schooling in the district. Teachers hope that parents will already have a strong stake in their child’s performance by the time of kindergarten.

Montgomery Junior High School in San Ysidro offers seminars, parent days, parent-children learning nights and other activities to encourage ongoing participation. Sherman Elementary School in the San Diego city district runs 6-week parent institutes at night and on Saturdays to explain school structure, parent rights and responsibilities, and ways to promote learning at home.

Programs in Minority

But such programs are still few and far between over the entire county. For various reasons--ranging from language problems to fear of intimidation by school

officials--Latino parents are far less involved with school than those of other ethnic groups, despite the fact that the dropout rate for Latino children is the highest among all groups.

In cases such as Vista, when conflict erupted over plans to bus students among elementary schools to maintain ethnic balances, no Latino parents showed up at school board meetings to offer their views.

A public information project is under way by the county Office of Education to persuade more districts to offer encouragement for Latino parents to make an initial visit to their child’s school. There are public-service spots on Spanish-language radio stations and distribution of thousands of flyers and posters in English and Spanish for the county’s 43 school districts, according to Thomas Boysen, county superintendent of schools.

Featuring Jaime Escalante

A special conference for Latino parents on Saturday morning will be co-sponsored by the city school district at San Diego High School and will feature as keynote speaker Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles high-school teacher upon whom the movie “Stand and Deliver” is based and who has motivated hundreds of poor Latino students toward educational success.

While city and county school officials stress that a lack of parental involvement in schools is not unique to Latino families, they say that the additional problems of language and economic hardship make solutions more difficult. They would like to see more districts borrow one or more of the ideas already being tried by Oceanside, National City and others.

In Oceanside, special teachers visit each migrant family at least twice a year and hold monthly meetings ranging from how to understand a report card and visit a school to ways for using daily household activities to reinforce math and reading skills. Migrant specialist Christina Valdez also talks with teachers in the district’s 19 schools about why Latino parents are hesitant about participation, explaining that in Mexico the teacher is considered the expert concerning education and that no tradition of parental involvement exists. (Oceanside has more migrant parents, who are defined specifically as agricultural workers, than most other districts.)

Parents Care But Need Help

“It is wrong to think that Latino parents don’t care about the education of their children,” Valdez said. “They do care because they don’t want their children to have to work as hard as they do . . . but they need help in getting the system to work better for them.”

Valdez asks parents to set aside quiet time for study, even though many live in cramped apartments, often with two or more families. “For example, I show them family math, where you can take cooking, sewing, and a host of home activities and incorporate math for elementary kids,” she said. “That way, I can show them that just because they may have little or no education themselves, there is much that they can do.”

The parents learn, for example, why teachers in U.S. schools emphasize large letters in handwriting compared to Mexican schools, where students receive only a single notebook for the entire school year and therefore try to write as small as they can.

Juan and Juana Arango have been able to motivate their oldest son Luis, now in the seventh grade, to the point where he has been selected for the district’s special college-preparatory program for minority students.

“I understand now that my children have the chance to do whatever they can,” Juana said, proudly holding reports she gets from the schools.

While Juan is not as involved as his wife, he tries to impress upon his three sons that “with education, they will not have to labor as hard as I do because of (no) education.” And because Luis has responded so well to his parents’ interest--having almost a straight-A average--his father has taken on extra work to try and provide his son with some clothes and other items that often have as much importance as school work for a junior high-age student.

The Gallegos have both begun taking adult English classes, and are now able to help their children regularly with math tables and other homework.

Too Tired to Help

Given the clear benefits from the program, why then do not more parents participate, a situation that frustrates the peripatetic Valdez?

“Some work so hard during the day that they just are drained of energy,” Adolpho Gallegos said. “I think that more parents will come (down the line) when they see that my kids will be doing better.”

In National City, administrators have taken a different tack toward the same goal. Using federal funding and a program begun in Missouri, they are teaching parents how to nurture their child and prepare for school beginning the moment the mother comes home from the hospital with her newborn.

So under the “parent as teacher” program, teacher Diane Davis each month visits homes of people like Victor and Antonio Ortiz, to give advice ranging from how to stimulate their infant son Sammy for better hand-and-eye coordination to basic information on book and toy selection. Bilingual flyers detail each stage of child development, from birth to kindergarten.

“The program helps the parents more than the child I think,” Victor Ortiz said. Victor takes off a day from work to be with his family when Davis visits.

“I tell parents that research shows the child’s cognitive skills will be more advanced by the time the child starts school than those of children not in the program,” Davis said in explaining how she was able to quickly sign up 91 parents--the maximum the program can handle. Two-thirds of the families are Latino.

“And I also emphasize that we are stimulating parents into taking a life-long interest in their children’s education by promoting good, strong bonding starting from birth.” The Ortizes said that the skills they have picked up have carried over into more interest about the education of their older son, who will enter junior high next fall.

If both parents must work, Davis and her colleagues spend time talking with baby sitters about things they can do to help the infants. At monthly meetings of all the parents, there are discussions about discipline, about how to deal with advice from relatives on child-rearing, and on nutrition and health topics.

Entry-Level Dropping

“We had to do something like this program,” said Linda Smith, National City’s curriculum coordinator. “We saw the entry level of our kids in kindergarten going down each year (as measured by standardized testing). Early intervention programs can be critical in preventing dropouts later, in preventing child abuse, and in giving our parents a good sense about the future.”

Added Davis, “It shows the school district going the extra mile and saying to parents, ‘We are interested in you from the start’ even though (given high transiency) many of the children could end up going to school in other districts.”

Principal William Demos at Montgomery Junior High in San Ysidro decided several years ago that he could not reach at-risk students--those in danger of dropping out--unless their parents were actively brought into the learning picture. His school sits about a mile from the international border and is heavily Latino.

The result is now a comprehensive program that finds parents volunteering in school, attending family computer, math, scavenger hunt and movie nights at school, and consulting regularly with teachers about incidents--good as well as bad--concerning their children.

Last week, Montgomery held its third annual “shadow your student” day, where parents go from class to class with their children. From a small beginning with about 20 parents a couple of years ago, the school attracted almost 200 parents, about 20% of those eligible to attend.

“Too often parents are contacted to come to school just for negatives, to talk with the vice principal about discipline problems,” said Anne Benedict, who oversees the Montgomery program. “And not only do we want parents to see us as a positive place, we try to show the kids that it’s all right to have their parents involved in school.”

Alicia Aguayo is a volunteer parent who got involved initially because of some difficulties her son Mario was having in classes.

“Mrs. Benedict has been so nice to me in making me feel like this is part of my home as well, and in having me get to know my son’s teachers and understand how he is doing and why,” Aguayo said. “I think my son is used to seeing me here now.”

Benedict said that Mario has improved in both attendance and in homework, adding that without the active parent outreach, she doesn’t believe Mario’s attitude toward school could ever have been turned around to the extent that it has.

“Sure it’s a slow, slow process,” Benedict said. “Some kids come back to (special discipline) classes year after year but I can show many individual cases where parental involvement has made a difference . . . and the parents then stay involved.”

Range of Subjects

Aguayo now helps with bilingual newsletters and other activities. Maria Garcia and Maria Landa show up at school for special lectures and classes on subjects ranging from teen-age pregnancy to typing.

“I liked the parenting workshop that helped us about our teen-agers,” Maria Landa said. “I think it was helpful in learning how to deal with my daughter.”

Benedict now is trying to incorporate the various elementary feeder schools to Montgomery in an expanded parent outreach.

While there is no systematic Latino parent program in the large San Diego city district--the nation’s eighth-largest with a 21% Latino enrollment--individual schools have set up their own programs using money squirreled away in special accounts.

The Sherman Elementary parent institute tries to reach parents at a school that is 80% Latino. Already, the first group of 250 parent graduates from the 6-week session have entered a second session dealing with more specific problems for parenting.

“The first one explains a lot about child development, about what parents can do for their children at home, as well as how schools here operate and how to talk to a teacher and what to ask about textbooks, report cards, and the like,” Vice Principal Dennis Doyle said.

“Our second session now is dealing with higher level thinking skills. For example, we put parents into hypothetical situations, such as how to deal with a junior-high age child who may be doing all right in school but doesn’t really like it and is thinking of dropping out and going to work instead,” Doyle said.

“We’re getting them to discuss real life problems that their kids might confront eventually.”

In addition, Doyle has found many parents contacting the school about things in the low-income Golden Hill neighborhood, such as empty weed fields that transients use.

“So there is now more involvement in the (overall) community sense,” Doyle said. Several parents spoke in February at the San Diego school board against a plan to have Sherman go on a multitrack year-round schedule at the same time a new curriculum is being introduced at the school. The board unanimously agreed with the parents and postponed multitrack for one year.

“My experience is that the school must reach out, and go the extra mile for (Latino and all parents),” Doyle said. “But if we do respect parents as people, there is no question that many will get involved.”