Education Advocates Vow to Put ‘Kids 1st’

Two or three times a week without fail, Antonio Arellano invites neighbors and area parents to his Lincoln Heights home. Socializing is not the veteran community activist’s purpose, but training parents how to become leaders in their own communities is.

His six children have already graduated from high school, but he is working to inform the mothers, fathers and grandparents who attend the meetings that they can make a difference in their children’s education.

It is “important to change the problems of the youth,” said Arellano, referring to the high rate of Latino school dropouts.

Arellano is not alone in this effort for Kids 1st, a new educational project that bills itself as “a partnership of business and community.” Thousands of house meetings are being held across Los Angeles County to get parents involved and to help Kids 1st develop its priorities and strategy.

But Kids 1st “is not just a parent participation organization; we’re a parent empowerment group,” said Curtis M. Page, an Industrial Areas Foundation official who is director of Kids 1st.

Kids 1st officials contend that the educational decision-making process is too concentrated in the hands of top administrators and district school boards. “We’re attempting to give the parents some power as to where the schools are going to go,” Page said.

Kids 1st is a collaborative effort of four grass-roots organizations affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation. The oldest, the United Neighborhood Organization, known as UNO, operates in the Eastside; the Southern California Organizing Committee (SCOC) is active in southern and central Los Angeles; the East Valleys Organization (EVO) is based in the San Gabriel Valley, and the Valley Organized in Community Efforts (VOICE) works in the San Fernando Valley.

“Our purpose is fairly simple but revolutionary,” said Lou Negrete, Cal State Los Angeles professor of Chicano studies and member of the Kids 1st campaign.

“We think we should have high school graduates who can read, write, do math and think clearly,” Negrete said. “The question is, ‘How do you design a school system that can meet that?’ (The Los Angeles Unified School District) can’t meet that, so there has to be a revolutionary change.”

Kids 1st campaign leaders point out that in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the high school dropout rate among Latinos is about 35%.

Referring to the dropout situation, Richard Riordan, a prominent Los Angeles attorney who is co-chair of the Kids 1st campaign, said: “These kids that are wasted do not have the skills to handle the jobs that are going to be needed in the future. This will also hurt the economy in Los Angeles. And if the economy of Los Angeles is hurt, the poor people will get a lot more hurt than the wealthy.”

To show support for the Kids 1st campaign, the four multiracial, heavily Latino groups have combined their annual budgets, for a total equivalent to $1 million in funds, staff and other resources, Page said. A number of California corporations have promised to match the $1 million during the campaign’s first phase, said Riordan, a senior partner at the Riordan & McKinzie law firm.

Leticia Quezada, Los Angeles Unified School District member, who has had a longstanding relationship with UNO and some of the other organizations, said, “Kids 1st has a very ambitious agenda. . . . The principles they adopted are something that all of us in public education would agree with. But, the next step to really see is where this is going.”

About 16,000 Kids 1st supporters are expected to gather Oct. 21 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena to hear the results of the house meetings and learn more about the group’s strategy.