Preschoolers Find Computer User Friendly

Marleeta Washington was taken aback when her preschooler, Dion, started bubbling over with talk of counting petals, creating animals, combining colors--all the fun things he and his classmates were doing with their new computers.

“He was so excited, and he seemed to know so much more, I just had to go down to the school and see for myself,” Washington said.

What she found at Western Avenue Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles was the latest addition to a proven, highly praised preschool program for disadvantaged youngsters in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Through a $30,885 donation from two individuals, Western Avenue and nine other schools in the city’s troubled core have just received the Mobius Corp.’s KIDWARE. It is a computer program aimed at boosting learning readiness and giving the youngest members of the Nintendo generation a jump-start on the technology that is sure to permeate their future.

IBM computers--two to a classroom--are going to some of the 4-year-old participants in the School Readiness Language Development Program, shown in a district report released last month to be one of the few components of its integration plan that have consistently paid off big.

Begun in 1979 after a long court battle over desegregating the district’s schools, the one-year, language-development-oriented preschool program was designed for those campuses that would not be integrated. It now includes almost 9,000 youngsters and operates at nearly half the district’s 414 elementary schools, according to June Ushijima, director of student integration/traveling programs for the district.

The program provides for 2 1/2-hour daily classes of 15 children each. It also includes parent-education programs and encourages parents to volunteer in their children’s classrooms and serve on decision-making committees.

Education experts are increasingly viewing early intervention and parental involvement as the two most important keys to improving a child’s chances of succeeding in school.

The program has won national recognition and has become a model for others in cities across the United States, causing fans such as school board member Rita Walters to praise it as “the shining star of our integration program.” But its biggest payoff has been in the achievements of its tiny alumni, who are evaluated annually.

They do much better on the Cooperative Preschool Inventory after their year in the program, and they consistently outscore their kindergarten classmates on the same test. On the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, they continue to score better than their classmates in reading and math up through at least the sixth grade, and they exhibit “more positive behavior” and higher self-esteem, Ushijima said.

The arrival of the computers recently caused quite a stir at Western Avenue, one of 34 district schools that also uses Writing to Read, a computer learning program for kindergartners and first-graders. Writing to Read has been provided to inner-city schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the nation by the Los Angeles-based Riordan Foundation.

“We feel KIDWARE ties in beautifully with Writing to Read,” said Alice McHugh of the Riordan Foundation, who is trying to raise private funds to put the preschool computer program in more classrooms. It is unlikely that the financially troubled school district can afford to buy the program itself.

The money to put KIDWARE into the first 10 schools came from philanthropist Win Rhodes Bea of San Marino and Michael E. Tennenbaum, an investment banker who spends his spare time working with inner-city youngsters.

Bea--who three years ago began the Los Angeles chapter of “I Have a Dream,” a college-incentive scholarship program for the disadvantaged--said her work with teen-agers led her to realize the importance of reaching children at an early age.

“I was so impressed (with a similar program in Pasadena) . . . Michael (Tennenbaum) and I decided this was the way we wanted to go,” Bea said during a recent Western Avenue gathering that was part demonstration of the program and part thank-you party.

Over in the preschool classroom, Delmy Huezo seemed quite at home as she used the computer’s “mouse” in a counting game. As the screen showed a colorful ladybug moving from petal to petal, the computer’s voice counted each one in Spanish. She correctly told the computer how many there were, and it responded by making the ladybug dance. She giggled, twisting the skirt of her red and white polka dot dress in excitement.

Seated at the next computer, Demetrius Jones signed on to an English-language version by picking his name from among those of his classmates. The computer screen flashed D-E-M-E-T-R-I-U-S in bold letters, its voice sounding out each letter. He counted some petals, then got a printout of his work. Seated next to him was Sharayah, who eagerly offered Demetrius some help as she awaited her turn at the computer--just the kind of “cooperative learning” their teachers are encouraging.

The parents who turned up at the school to personally thank Bea and Tennenbaum told of their youngsters’ fascination with the computers.

“My 4-year-old can’t wait to come to school--and she wants to bring her brother and sister so they can see what she’s doing,” Juanita Purifory said.