Angry Pico Rivera Parents Say Sagging School Test Scores Are No Joke

Alice LaHeist says she likes to march into school board meetings in Pico Rivera wearing her white T-shirt with blue lettering emblazoned across the front and back:

“I’m a concerned parent. Are you? E.R.U.S.D. Support Quality Education!”

The shirt is an attention-getter, LaHeist says--a way to let officials of the El Rancho Unified School District know that her children are not receiving the education she expects.

LaHeist is a member of a growing group of disgruntled Pico Rivera parents who are upset over lower-than-average standardized test scores and preliminary reports--which officials dispute--that the 13,200-student district has a 50% dropout rate.

“A long time ago I heard that the El Rancho school district was going to be one of the premier school districts in the area,” said LaHeist, who has five children. “Ha! Our district is a joke. And when you become a joke, it’s not funny.

“They don’t expect our children to be achievers, and we want that changed,” LaHeist continued. “We want them to be expected to be the president of the U.S. These are our future leaders.”

Assistant Supt. Norbert Genis said district officials plan to work with the parents to help solve the district’s problems. About 30 parents meet regularly to discuss education in the district. Some of their concerns are valid, Genis said, but administrators are “not about to say our program is going down the tubes.”

Supt. Thomas Sakalis said: “We feel we have the basis for a strong education program, but we’re continually trying to find out if there are places we could be doing better. If the parents have concerns, we will listen to them.”

The dispute between the parents and school administrators heated up several months ago when the state reported that the dropout rate in the El Rancho school district is 50%, more than twice that of surrounding districts.

Later, El Rancho district officials announced that a mistake had been made: Someone had accidentally submitted the wrong numbers to the state. Sakalis said the dropout rate is actually about 20%, the Los Angeles County average.

Too late, LaHeist said. The damage was already done. “We became a laughingstock,” she said. “We were embarrassed in front of the whole state.”

Said Angie Lora, a mother of two: “I’d talk to parents in other districts and they would tell me: ‘I wouldn’t touch your district with 10-foot pole. I’d move out.’ ”

Suddenly, what began as a gathering of seven unhappy mothers grew to a vocal group of more than 30 concerned parents, said Stella Millan, who has four children.

“We started talking more,” Millan said. “The more we talked, the angrier we became. It wasn’t just something affecting my children; it was something concerning all of our children, the district’s children.”

Group members took a closer look at standardized test scores. They discovered that the average eighth-grade reading score for 1988-89 was 58 points lower than the average third-grade score. Third-graders scored 262, slightly above the county average, while eighth-graders scored 204, 24 points below the county average.

Something was breaking down in the school system between the third and the eighth grade, the parents said, and they wanted to know what.

Genis said school officials are asking the same question.

“That’s what we’re trying to analyze now,” he said, adding that the problem may be caused by the district’s approach to teaching.

‘Children Are Different’

“We still are using methods from 60, 70 years ago,” he said. “The children are different than they were than. We’ve been trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.”

Genis said this approach may also be contributing to the dropout rate.

“Students are bored,” Stella Millan said. “By the time my son got to junior high, he didn’t want to go to school. I kept saying, ‘Next year it will get better.’ Well, guess what? My son has graduated, but I had a heck of a time keeping him in school.

“It hurts me to no end to think that I didn’t do enough to get my son a better education,” Millan continued. “I won’t do that again.”

Next fall, Millan said, she will place her youngest child in a private school. But she still plans to participate in the El Rancho parents’ group.

“We’re not going to go away,” LaHeist said. “We’re just going to keep rattling their cages.”

Genis said he welcomes the parents’ interest.

“We have involvement from parents we’ve never had before,” he said. “I’d like to join hands and see how we can utilize available funding and improve our efforts.

“We are all interested in a better education.”