Immigrant Parents Learn the ABC’s of L.A. : Education: School district provides a crash course in American culture, including gangs and drugs.

Most Los Angeles residents are all too familiar with 911, the McMartin case, PCP and gangs. But to a group of parents they are new, shocking and perplexing parts of American life that they’re learning about each week this summer.

The parents, all recent immigrants, are taking part in seminars at several elementary and high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District as part of the federally funded Emergency Immigrant Education Assistance Program. For the past five years, the program has offered immigrant children a six-week crash course in English and American culture. This summer, for the first time, a structured curriculum has been geared to parents.

In all, about 550 parents are participating. At Hollywood’s Gardner Street School, for example, the 90-minute Friday sessions draw immigrants from Soviet Armenia, Russia, Korea, Mexico, El Salvador and other Latin and Central American countries, whose children are getting the program’s crash course in other classrooms.

The district encourages parents to take part, sending out multilingual reminders and providing transportation, interpreters and refreshments as well as the chance to visit their children’s classes.

“You need the parents to come in and care,” said counselor Debbie Andorka-Aceves, who organized the program at Gardner Elementary. In the United States, she said, education is “a partnership between school and community.”

In classrooms and in the Michael Jackson Auditorium--named after the pop superstar, an alumnus of Gardner--the 30 immigrants who attended recently got answers to a number of questions:

Do I have to pay if I call 911 and an ambulance comes?

My sister lives upstairs, her son sells drugs, and I send my children to play with the cousins--is that OK?

How can I ensure that my family stays close?

Also provided was some nuts-and-bolts information, such as an explanation of school district forms and a tour of the school. Los Angeles Police Department officers told the parents that they shouldn’t be afraid to call the police. A school nurse explained that students with chickenpox need to stay home for seven days, a rule that dismayed one mother, Lee Kyung Ja.

“We’re always teaching children not to miss school,” she said. In her native Korea, she added, students might sit apart from the rest of the class and wear masks over their noses and mouths, but they’d go to school unless they were seriously ill.

Other discussions and handouts covered teaching children how to deal with anger, talking about feelings, encouraging children with smiles and words and by tousling their hair, and “counting to 10” before responding when angry. The parents got copies of “L.A. Parent,” a thick tabloid, and teddy bear-decorated “Bear Hug” slips to compliment their children.

Parenting skills, Andorka-Aceves said, help in the battle against the darker realities of life here--such as teen-age suicide, drugs and gangs--that the parents said are not problems in their homelands.

Korean mothers wondered why there was a presentation on child abuse, and the interpreter explained the McMartin Preschool case to them. “Ooohh,” said Park Kyung Sook, an immigrant of seven months, her brows furrowed in surprise and sympathy.

Meanwhile, teacher Carlos Bejar, speaking Spanish, explained child abuse laws to the 20 Latino parents. Spanking, commonplace in Latino cultures, “becomes child abuse here. . . . In Latin America, we’re doing the wrong thing,” he said. “Using a belt was never the proper way to raise kids.”

Bejar, who was trained by the Drug Enforcement Adminstration to head an equivalent agency in Ecuador, described the dangers of marijuana, crack, PCP, “ice” and alcohol. His attire, black from head to toe, matched his stark facts.

Movies and television can be a bad influence, said Bejar, who speaks to classes and community organizations about drugs. In one Spanish-language soap opera, the characters are often drinking and the setting is often a night club, he said. Children then see nothing wrong with drinking liquor, he said.

Gangs are another new phenomenon to the parents, who were advised to set rules and a curfew for their children and find out where and with whom their children play. “Little kids, when they come from other countries, want to be accepted, be popular, be involved in the gangs in the barrios,” Bejar told the Latino parents. “It’s very easy to join the gangs.”

Other parents, meeting with teacher Mark Marfori in another room, all raised their hands when asked if gangs and drugs are problems only of blacks and Latinos. Wrong, said Marfori.

Vietnamese, Armenians, Koreans, Filipinos, and other youths have formed gangs, said Marfori, who works with Bejar. Initially banding together for protection and solidarity, they have become more violent, he said.

“Just because your kid’s getting straight A’s doesn’t mean he’s not involved in gangs or using drugs. The last stabbing of the year (at a junior high school in Sepulveda) was done by a straight-A (Vietnamese) kid,” Marfori said. In the spring, a Korean high school student knifed a black rival gang member, he added.

Many victims do not belong to a gang but hang around gang members and get shot, said Marfori, whose words were followed by the buzz of Korean, Russian and Armenian interpreters talking to small clusters of parents. “I was a bit scared,” Hur Myong Hwa, who came from Korea 10 months ago, said after the presentation, “especially because I have a boy. . . . I was shocked to learn there was a stabbing by an Asian--and a Korean.”

Said Karine Kitapszyan, from Armenia: “It’s good they’re telling us now, before (the children) get into trouble. This is very timely.”

The parents were urged to call on their children’s teachers, but some said school still seems inaccessible.

In Seoul, many mothers do not work and have the time to volunteer at school and visit teachers on the spur of the moment, said Park Kyung Sook, who has a 9-year-old daughter. Here, many mothers hold jobs to help support the family, and language is a barrier between parent and teacher, she said.

Parents also worry that the U.S. school system is too lax. “In Korea, education is very structured. You want to be No. 1. . . . You’re always competing with your classmates,” said Shin Chong Hyon. Her two sons, not surprisingly, “like it here--they don’t have pressure, they can explore, they can go at their own pace,” she said.

Park Young Suk, who emigrated from Korea three months ago, said she plans to send her children to extra classes after school.

In Armenia, Kitapszyan said, “the teachers are very strict--and the children are always scared and respect (them).”

Students there also wear uniforms, a policy that father Sarkis Macharyan prefers. “I wouldn’t want my daughter to dress in shorts or something different every day. School is a businesslike place. (Students) shouldn’t dress any way they want.”

“And then they can’t display these (gang) colors,” added Kitapszyan.

The five-week program, which ends this week, has found the parents agreeing with Bejar’s message that “you have to change the way you raise your kids (because) it’s a very different culture here.” But despite the new environment and new problems, they hope, as Kitapszyan said, that “our children won’t change.”