Role of Parents Seen as Key to Students’ Success

Irma Castillo remembers she first wanted to become involved when “they told me my children weren’t learning” at Wilmington Park Elementary School in Wilmington.

That was enough for the mother of four sons to take action. “I knew I had to do something to help them,” she said.

First she petitioned to have the school’s bulletins, which her oldest sons brought home pinned to their clothes, printed in both English and Spanish.

She was successful with the bulletin campaign, an outcome that helped her become more aware of school activities. Next she confronted a teacher to ask why her oldest son, who was in the fourth grade, did not know how to do division. After a week had passed with no improvement in his ability, Castillo recalled, she taught him that very night the same way she learned how to divide in Mexico.

“People think everything is so different in the United States because of the language difference. But many things are the same in Mexico,” she said.

Since those early days, Castillo has continued to work at the school in the predominantly Latino neighborhood. For the last 12 years, she has been a community liaison and worked to get other parents active in the school.

“Parents should ask and participate . . . and never accept an answer of no,” said Castillo, who recently helped plan a ceremony to honor 350 parents whose children had perfect attendance for one school year. “I don’t accept answers of no. I’m stubborn and . . . I’m interested.”

Other Los Angeles-area organizations have used that theme of persistence in conducting their own parent-training programs. By helping the parents become more involved, the goal is to help raise student achievement and help lower the high dropout rate, which is about 35% for Latinos in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

These efforts by community groups and area parents are incongruous with the picture of Latino parents painted recently by Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos, who lamented that while “Hispanic tradition valued education . . . somewhere along the line we lost that. . . . We really have not cared that youngsters have dropped out of school.”

Many Latino parents and educators agree that the parent involvement cited by Cavazos is vital for student success, but they say parents should be encouraged to participate rather than be blamed for school problems.

Among the parent training projects in Southern California is the Parent Leadership Program, operated by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. About 60 parents attend weekly sessions in Maywood and Huntington Park schools.

“We’ve had parents who’ve said that (the Parent Leadership Program) has totally changed their outlook,” MALDEF program coordinator Luisa Perez-Ortega said. “They didn’t know what their parents’ rights were, they didn’t know their children had the right to a good education.”

Other similar programs include UC Irvine’s Parents in Partnership program, which teaches parents from 22 Santa Ana, Long Beach and Compton schools how to help their children attain a higher education, and the Parent Academy for Quality Education, which instructs Eastside parents on how the educational system works and how to participate at home in their children’s education.

Despite the parental participation programs under way, teachers acknowledge that a large number of parents are not sufficiently involved.

They attribute much of this failure not to parental disinterest, as Cavazos’ statement implied, but to institutional barriers. Some parents say they do not feel welcome. Others say they feel intimidated because they do not speak English, and others, especially those whose children are bused to schools out of the area, lack transportation to visit the schools.

Leticia Quezada, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, agrees that her district, whose enrollment is 62% Latino, is not doing enough to help parents and “could do a whole lot more.”

Quezada said she looks at parental involvement on two levels. “There (are) the parent educators and the parents who are active advocates.”

“Parent educators” visit teachers on back-to-school night, keep track of their children’s academic progress and make sure they complete their homework, she said. Meanwhile, “active advocates” work to better the school system for the benefit of all students. For example, they plan field trips and fund-raisers and are often involved in parent leadership councils.

“We always say, the first teacher is the parent,” Quezada said.