PLATFORM : Who Will Help Kids If Parents Don’t?

SWEET ALICE HARRIS of Parents of Watts was asked by The Times to comment on breaking the cycle of child neglect and failure in the schools. Some of her views:

I think we should be focusing on elementary education, because if you get a good background, if they have a good foundation, you wouldn’t have the problems you have now. You have a problem in junior high and high school when you test a student and he tests as a third- and fourth-grade reader . . .

I think the problem is everybody’s, the community, the parents, the churches, the organizations, the schools. We all ought to focus on early childhood education.

We (the Parents of Watts) have a school next door, and that comes from us doing this. In the afternoon we have tutors. We have young people coming here in the afternoon to do their homework. The teachers are from the the school district, from John Locke Adult School.

The students that stay in the tutoring class are the ones that we have in college. We should have tutoring in the afternoon in the churches. Every church in the area should be open, with a teacher. The school district should send a teacher to help them get their homework, because if the parent in the home is on a fixed income, on welfare, on drugs, whatever the reason, it’s not the child’s fault. But that’s who suffers, because then we say, ‘Well, they have a parent, let them do it.’ And because the parent doesn’t do it, the child becomes neglected. And then when they get to be teen-agers, they can fight out against (the neglect), then we say, ‘What’s gonna happen to our teen-agers?’ Because we didn’t take care of them when they were in elementary school.