Quality Time for Some Families Is a Trip to Classroom

Larry Nix had not been back to school in 14 years, and he never expected that the day he finally returned he would find himself sitting in a circle singing the children’s song, “Cheesecake, gobble gobble, cheesecake gobble gobble.”

But there he was, with wife Andrea, his two daughters Shante and Tiffany, and 15 other children he had never laid eyes on, watching a banjo-playing teacher who called himself Michael Jackson and referred to the rest of the class as the Jackson family.

“This is fantastic,” Nix said. “It makes you feel like a kid all over again.”

Nix, a 31-year-old janitor, went to Washington Elementary School in Bellflower on a recent Saturday with his family to relearn some of the basic academic skills he had forgotten since graduating from Centennial High School in Compton.

What he got was his first computer lesson, a few sing-alongs with teacher Jim Lanners, a.k.a. Michael Jackson, a lecture on personal safety from the “Stranger Danger Lady” who warned the children against talking to strangers, and his first homework assignment since 1976: instructions for the family to create whatever they wanted from a bag of marshmallows, a box of Jell-O and some toothpicks.

The Nix family is among the first participants in a Bellflower Unified School District program for parents who do not have the money to go back to school and who are looking for a way to spend more time with their children, project coordinator Linda Bobkowski said.

Every Saturday for half a day, parents and their children meet at Washington Elementary School, where they play together for one hour until parents separate to attend classes that hone their reading, writing and mathematics skills on a computer.

Bobkowski calls the 14-week program Parent Partners and said it is the only program in Los Angeles County and perhaps Southern California designed to get low-income families involved in school life. Bobkowski said children are taught hygiene, self-esteem, good nutrition and personal safety, and their mothers and fathers learn basic parenting and academic skills.

“How can the parents help their kids if they don’t have the skills?” Bobkowski asked parents recently. “A lot of parents don’t want to help their kids with schoolwork, because they don’t know how to do it. It doesn’t mean you are stupid or uneducated. It just means you need help in basic skills.”

During the first meeting of Parent Partners in a classroom with crooked Valentine hearts pasted on the windows and wooden dinosaur toys scattered about, Nix grabbed the chance to relearn what he said he did not learn well in the first place--math, reading and writing.

“This is a chance for me to make up for it,” he said.

Bobkowski said the program is modeled after a federal program known as Even Start. It is Bobkowski’s hope that Parent Partners will eventually be funded by a federal grant. The $4,000 project was coordinated by Bobkowski, Merwyn Smith, director of adult education programs, and Maryann Suggs, director of child development programs. It is supported by federal funds for poverty level families.

“We want to make sure that when parents are learning, kids are learning, too,” Suggs said.

Eleven families have joined already, and Smith said that because the program is well under way no more families will be allowed to join.

On the first Saturday of the program, nine families with about 20 children gave up a sunny weekend morning to go to school, and no one seemed to mind. They came for different reasons: some to learn how to work with their children, some to show their children that they are interested in what they do at school, and some to brush up on academic skills.

“It seems to help everybody all the way around,” said Donna Rodgers, 53, who attended the classes with her daughter and 6-year-old grandson, Brian. “I’ve always wanted to learn the computer. If I had one at home, I could find something to do to supplement my income. Anything would help.”

Third-grader Cheri Ballard, who was busy covering the classroom’s frantic gerbil with raw white rice, did not know much about her mother’s being able to take classes, but said she was glad her mother was coming to school. “We never get to see her that much,” Cheri said.

Cheri’s mother, Sharon, said: “I wasn’t sure what this program was going to be about,” Ballard said. “I just knew I needed more communication and time with my daughters. This will give us a chance to have time together, I hope.”

For Mireya and Sebastian Cerda, Parent Partners is much more than being able to spend time with their 3-year-old daughter, Angela, or sitting down in front of a computer for the first time. It is an indoctrination into American society, Mireya Cerda said. The couple moved to Bellflower from Chile about 1 1/2 years ago.

“We come from another culture,” she said. “We are learning two things. We are learning about the society and we are learning to be parents.”