Sagging School District Catches Ire of Parents

Alice LaHeist says she likes to march into school board meetings 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.

‘District Is a Joke’

“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. 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 was 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.”

Group members took a closer look at standardized test scores. Third-graders scored 262 in 1988-89, 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.