COLUMN ONE : REGIONAL REPORT : Schoolwork Becoming Homework : Educators press parents to get involved in quest for improved academic performance. Research shows that it pays off.

Julia Barnheiser, an emissary from Santa Ana’s Madison Elementary School, knew this case would be tough: The boy was about to be expelled from first grade. He could not behave. He often missed school altogether.

At the boy’s home, Barnheiser found hard-working, Mexican-born parents who overloaded the boy with household chores and took him out of school to translate for them. In the Spanish of the barrio, she persuaded them to attend school-sponsored English, parenting and counseling classes.

The child’s resulting turnaround “was like night and day,” Barnheiser said. “He’s a third-grader now. He gets all kinds of awards.”

Faced with a continuing battle to improve academic performance among the nation’s students, educators are now turning to the home front for answers.

In Southern California, dozens of districts, without state funds but sometimes with partnership money from business, are experimenting with innovative tactics to engage parents in education:

In San Diego’s South Bay Union School District, all elementary students this week will be required to write daily journals of what they learned in school, information that often fades by the time parents come home from work. Parents are to write back comments to the teacher, or the child, such as “I’m glad to see you worked on the multiplication tables today.”

Irvine’s Los Naranjos Elementary School will launch an electronic voice mail system in October that parents can dial to hear an explanation of their child’s class work and homework.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which reopened its doors to more than 600,000 students on Tuesday, has provided transportation to bring parents to bilingual workshops on health, child abuse, drugs, gangs, school rules and filling out forms.

Research has long shown that involving parents in their children’s education pays off. Significant parent involvement in choosing key personnel, programs and budgets is frequently credited for the success of Head Start’s preschool program for low-income children. In Los Angeles, Project Ahead has been sending liaisons into parents’ homes in South Central Los Angeles for 12 years, a move that has improved attendance and attitude.

Since 1983, when the Commission on Excellence in Education publication “A Nation at Risk” described the failure of American education to compete with other industrialized countries, educators have experimented with efforts to upgrade curriculum and tighten testing--with inconclusive results.

Now, “Everybody is starting to say, the institution that has changed more than any other in the last quarter century is the home. It’s the one we have to address in the 1990s,” said Ed Foglia, president of the California Teacher’s Assn.

“Almost every report nationally and statewide talks about parents being involved,” he said.

Among those now seeking more parental involvement at all grade levels as part of educational reform are the National Assn. of State Boards of Education, state and national PTAs, the state Department of Education and U.S. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos, who has repeatedly called for more involvement from Latino parents.

To the reformers, “getting involved” can mean anything from turning off the TV and making sure children don’t use drugs or alcohol, to volunteering in the school building or participating in democratic school-based management councils.

In the ABC Unified School District, which includes Artesia, Cerritos, Hawaiian Gardens and portions of Lakewood and Norwalk, parents from a screening committee interviewed the six new principals hired for this fall.

While the final decision was made by the district superintendent, he “would not consider candidates unless they had been approved by parents on the screening panel,” said Assistant Supt. Ira Toibin.

In Irvine, Bruce Baron, principal of Irvine’s Los Naranjos Elementary School, believes that parents can boost learning by having children repeat at home what they learned in school to make the “neurological connections” that assist long-term memory.

The telephone messages left by teachers for parents will say, for example, “We studied condensation today in class. Ask your child to explain it to you.”

However, too many parents still find it difficult to participate in anything beyond the bake sale level, if at all, and few schools encourage them, authorities said.

In fact, the traditional distance between parents and schools--rooted in the notion that teaching is better left to professionals--has widened in recent years because of massive changes in the makeup of the population and in family life.

In California, 15% of the population was born outside the United States; of 170,000 children who were born in California or who immigrated to the state last year, 90,000 have limited English proficiency; 63% of mothers in two-parent families are working, and it is estimated that half of all children will live with a single parent at some time.

Groups such as the PTA claim that no parent is too overwhelmed nor too alienated to become involved in some way.

“People say, ‘What about different cultures, different ethnic groups, working, single parents?’ As far as the PTA’s concerned, that is not a valid excuse for not being involved,” said Nancy Jenkins, vice president of parent education for the California State PTA, which is refocusing its purpose from fund-raising to parental involvement.

“If you decide to become a parent, that child must be a priority in your life in the critical years you’re raising them,” Jenkins said.

In some cities, parents have become so involved, they have taken over the school systems completely. As of last year, each of the 540 schools in the Chicago school system is run by an elected, parent-led council.

“Overall, we’ve had a lot of positive response. We have 6,000 people involved in schools that were not necessarily actively involved before,” said press secretary Marj Halperin. Some organizational problems remain, however. “You’re not going to close the book on this overnight,” she said.

But studies show that most parents will not get involved in school unless they know what to do.

According to figures from two Maryland studies in the 1980s, 20% of parents typically involve themselves on their own. Fewer than 10% said they were too overwhelmed by personal problems to even think about getting involved.

The rest indicated they would like to help, but didn’t know how, said Joyce Epstein, principal research scientist at the Center for Research on Elementary and Middle Schools at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “They’re waiting for information and rarely get it.”

So far, about half the state’s school districts have come up with plans, some innovative, to reach out to parents.

This summer, the Los Angeles Unified School District presented at several schools a series of workshops for recent immigrants, as part of a federally funded program. Topics included health, child abuse, drugs, gangs, school rules and forms and teaching children how to deal with anger. At Hollywood’s Gardner Street School, for instance, the weekly session drew Armenian, Russian, Korean and Latino immigrants. The district sent out multilingual notices and provided transportation, interpreters and refreshments.

Korean parents were dismayed to learn that students with chicken pox need to stay home for seven days. “We’re always teaching children not to miss school,” said mother Lee Kyung Ja.

Other parents were shocked to hear that gangs are not just a black and Latino phenomenon, but that Koreans, Vietnamese, Armenian and other youths have formed gangs as well. The parents were advised to set rules and a curfew for their children, and find out where and with whom their children play.

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

Some schools have invited busy working parents, including an increasing number of fathers, to come into the classroom and describe their jobs, or just help out.

Gary Nakagawa, 33, a divorced father of two, works at night as supervisor of a produce warehouse and volunteers every Monday morning for three hours at Roosevelt Elementary School in Anaheim where his son, Jay, is in kindergarten.

At school, he reads stories, tests children on counting to 100, or helps the teacher cut or trace paper projects.

Sometimes, he said, he’s so tired that he dozes off in class, and the teacher sends him home. But it’s worth it, he says.

“If I seem interested in their schoolwork, it makes them more interested,” he said of his children.

Despite the successes, authorities say much remains to be done.

Among the half of California’s school districts that have not devised parental involvement plans, some are “tremendously resistant,” said Nancy Honig, a parent education consultant and wife of Bill Honig, the state superintendent of public instruction. Her nonprofit organization, Quality Education Project, is a consultant to 35 school districts and to the the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

“They don’t want thousands of parents running around their schools like chickens with their heads cut off,” she said of those who resist the programs.

In areas where Anglo teachers represent the minority, some teachers are also afraid of parents.

“They say, ‘But I can’t talk to the parent. I can’t speak their language. There are angry parents out there. I haven’t been trained in conflict resolution skills,’ ” said Janet Chrispeels, a consultant to the San Diego city schools, which this summer launched parent involvement programs, including training parents on strategies for reading aloud with their children as well as child development and discipline.

“They say, ‘I don’t have the time, I’m busy with my own life. I can’t call these parents at night. Schools are not paying me.’ ”

Acknowledging that working with parents requires different skills than working with students, the National Assn. of State Boards of Education has called for teacher and staff training programs in how to understand parents.

Meanwhile, some parents are taking matters into their own hands.

“We want to say (to teachers), ‘Look, you guys have been teaching 20 years here. This community has changed fundamentally and you don’t even know anything about the community you live in. Let’s talk about kids from El Salvador who were involved in civil war before they set foot in the Los Angeles unified school system’,” said Ed Gallegos, president of Parents and Students in Action, a group that offers leadership training to parents so they can participate in councils and school-based management projects, now in place in 27 Los Angeles schools.

“We’re trying to train parents to get into these councils, like they have every right to raise their hand and say this is (nonsense) or this is wonderful,” Gallegos said. Parents, especially Latino parents are not trained. Most are working-class folks, afraid to talk to teachers about their child’s grade, much less about decisions for the schools.”

Some of those on the front line resent educators who point the finger at parents, yet refuse to back up programs with money.

Without significant funding, the parental involvement movement so far looks like “so much rhetoric,” said Genethia Hayes, program director of Project Ahead in Los Angeles. “This is not something that can happen with volunteers.”

In contrast, Barnheiser said she has managed to pull off a successful program by enlisting the aid of volunteer professionals to teach classes in parenting and English as a second language and to provide counseling. In addition to her own home visits, she also makes morning wake-up phone calls to tardy children. She knocks on parents’ doors nights and weekends. She finds truant children who are at home baby-sitting younger children and brings them to school. “It’s important to have people like me in every school,” Barnheiser said. “Just one small intervention can make the difference in a child’s life.”

Times staff writers Barbara Koh and Lee Harris contributed to this report.