Latino Parents Urged to Voice School Concerns

One by one, loaded down with calendar planners, personal phone books and note pads, they huddle around their leader, Leticia Quezada, ready to talk shop: the education of their children.

For the next three hours the 20 Latino parents from East Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley discuss issues from overcrowding to the need for more bilingual teachers--issues Quezada will take before the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Quezada, the third Latino (and first Latina) to serve on the school board, is fiercely committed to parent involvement in the schools and making leaders out of parents. Ninety percent of the students in the 5th District she represents are Latino.

“Contrary to popular belief,” Quezada said, “there are many active Latino parents in our schools. I encourage those parents to demand information and to expect that their children get a quality education. If we want parents to be a part of the education of their children they have to know by experience.

“To have parents come in and make demands on a school or a teacher or a school board member should not be viewed as troublesome, but rather as an asset,” said Quezada, 36.

“One of the cornerstones that makes Leticia tick is the commitment to empower those who don’t have it, especially the parents she represents,” said Quezada’s husband, Steven Uranga, 41, a city management analyst for the Community Development Department of Los Angeles.

One of those parents is Martha Cardenas, the mother of a junior and a senior in high school.

“Being involved at the district level is new for me,” said Cardenas, a member of the Hispanic Parent Coalition, a group of Latinos who regularly meet with Quezada.

“She has encouraged us as parents to stay informed because she is willing to share information with us,” Cardenas said. “I feel re-energized as a parent because we have somebody who cares about us. She listens to us.”

Armida Navarro, an East Los Angeles community leader and District 5 resident for more than 20 years, said parent participation has increased as a result of Quezada’s efforts to increase recruitment of Latino teachers.

“I feel that Leticia has learned a lot from working with parents. And she makes herself available. But, more than anything, she has shown her constituency that Latinos count,” said Navarro, who has had three children graduate from the district and presently has a daughter in eighth grade.

Gabriel Alvarez, a member of the Hispanic Parent Coalition and chairman of a regional bilingual advisory committee, agrees.

“For more than 20 years we have been fighting for more parent training so we can have a say in the education of our children,” he said, adding that Quezada has helped Latino parent groups plan strategy so that more parents can become involved. “She has motivated us,” said Alvarez, the South Gate parent of a fourth-grader.

Parent participation at Wilson High School in northeast Los Angeles is up as a direct result of Quezada’s influence, said Ramon Castillo, the first Latino principal in that school’s 53-year history.

“She has had night meetings here in which she addressed the problems and possible solutions to the gang situation. With each meeting more and more parents attended because she familiarized the community with the problem by including administrators, teachers, the police and, most important, the parents,” Castillo said.

Less than two months ago, he said, Quezada spoke before a packed auditorium about the district’s Shared Decision Making program, which trains parents how to have a say in matters of staff development, student discipline and school budgets. She spoke to the parents in both English and Spanish and encouraged them to carry out plans of action to ensure quality education for their children, he said.

Fellow school board member Roberta Weintraub said Quezada, who holds a full-time job as manager of community relations and Latino marketing for the Carnation Co., is extremely businesslike. “She is very efficient and corporate because she works in corporate America. She is diligent and thorough.”

In January, Quezada’s business approach to school board matters was in high gear as she helped make one of the board’s most difficult and important decisions affecting the district--putting schools on a year-round calendar.

She said after months of researching the subject she had no choice but to vote for the year-round schedule and stick to her decision. “I felt that the decision the board made was very important and necessary because we have a housing crisis for students,” Quezada said. “We expect 20,000 new children next year and we have no classrooms where they can go.”

She said the year-round calendar decision is not an issue of, “Are you for or against overcrowding?” but instead “an issue of resolving a problem even if it took an unpopular action by the board.”

“The best thing to do is to construct new schools and we are pursuing that,” she said, “but not fast enough to meet the needs of the district.”

Since taking office in 1987, Quezada has carried the banner for the district’s Master Plan for the Education of the Limited English Proficient Students, who now number 187,000. Of that total, 165,000 are Spanish speakers.

Quezada has fought and won to get a $5,000 salary incentive for bilingual teachers and is working on a plan to have teaching assistants--who number 10,000 in the district--reach full-fledged bilingual teacher status.

Quezada is quick to recall her personal and school experiences. Her mother had to cross the Juarez border into El Paso every Sunday to work as a maid, cook and baby-sitter until the next Friday when she returned. During the week, Quezada attended school, kept house and cared for her sick father, a miner with a second-grade education. He always spoke to her about the importance of a good education. Afflicted with tuberculosis, he died at age 33. Leticia was just 9 years old.

Four years later, her immigrant experience began--one that included getting Fs at a new school in Pittsburg, Calif., because of the cultural barriers she faced as an adolescent immigrant.

Determined to make sense of the foreign language that filled her ears, she drilled herself to the point of exhaustion every night, slept with a dictionary under her pillow and attended classes religiously.

“I experienced a lot of trauma, alienation, anger and embarrassment,” Quezada recalls. “Those were the most difficult times of my life because my father always instilled in me the desire to have a good education, and here I wasn’t learning anything in the classroom.”

That’s why Quezada says she knows exactly how the Spanish-speaking students feel about sitting in a classroom, learning the English language from scratch.

But she is confident the students she refers to as “the children” will survive. She has set a plan in action so that they might. And she believes in a philosophy she says works: the personal touch.

“Whomever you are in the school district, you have to live every single moment of your workday believing that what those children need from you is caring,” she said. “They are not masses of human beings. They are not problems. They are hungry for education and we must feed their souls with it.”