Latinos in Vista Feel Left Out, Form Their Own Version of Venerable PTA

Saying the Parent Teachers Assn. has failed Latino parents and their children, Latinos in Vista have formed their own version of the school group.

The Hispanic Parents Committee, the first parent-organized effort in San Diego County to help forge stronger ties between the schools and Latinos, hopes to do for Latino parents in the Vista Unified School District what the PTA has done for other parents: involve them more in their children’s education.

One of the main barriers to getting Latino parents involved has been language, with PTA meetings being conducted in English and many school pamphlets sent home only in English.

“Up until now, there wasn’t a parents group to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we need to have this in Spanish,’ ” said Sylvia Aguirre, who earlier this year founded the independent Latino parents group with branches at Vista and Rancho Buena Vista high schools.

“A lot of unintentional abuses took place in the schools in the past against Hispanics, and there wasn’t anyone around to say anything about it,” said Aguirre, a former president and current member of the Vista High PTA. “Now there is.”

Materials such as school rules, insurance forms, college and career information and other notices sent home with students were not printed in Spanish, said Graciela Holland, president of the Vista High branch of the Hispanic Parents Committee.

More than a third--36%--of the district’s students are Latino.

“The material was there for everybody, but it was available only in English, and if you didn’t speak English, you didn’t know it’s available,” Holland said. “Now either we translate it into Spanish or we try to find a way to get the school to translate the materials.”

Activists and Latino parents in San Diego County view the venerable organization as representing and catering to the interests of the white middle class while ignoring many of the groups that need it most.

“PTA has long been considered to be a white, middle-class organization because it largely is a white middle-class organization, and that is what has to change,” said Katie Klumpp, director of San Diego City Unified School District PTA’s Project HOPE, which is designed to increase the involvement of parents of under-represented groups.

Klumpp, herself a white, middle-class woman, says the mainstream orientation of the PTA leadership blinds it to the group’s responsibility to other segments of society.

The PTA has for nearly a century held an institutional monopoly on parent input into schools across the country and offers parents experience and organizational skills in getting involved in policy-making at schools.

“A PTA works best when parents and teachers meet and teachers and parents accept each other as equals,” said Vahac Mardirosian, founder of the Parents Institute for Quality Education in San Diego, a nonprofit organization that teaches Latino parents about the school system. “In poverty areas, there is a socioeconomic barrier. People who are well-to-do do not consider poor people as their equals.”

Latino parents, particularly those who have recently arrived in the United States, have difficulty adjusting from an educational system in which parents do not question the policies of schools and teachers to one in which parental interest is gauged by their active involvement, Aguirre said.

But the language and educational barriers, and lack of knowledge about what programs are at the schools, keep many Latino parents from getting involved in such programs as parent-teacher conferences and open houses, according to Aguirre and Holland; the teachers and other school officials then interpret their absence as apathy toward their children’s education.

“When they know what they are supposed to do, they want to participate, but they say, ‘Well, the meetings at schools are always in English and I only speak Spanish, so why go,’ ” Holland said.

“Would you volunteer if you didn’t understand a word that was spoken at a meeting?” Aguirre said.

The committee overcomes the language barrier by holding meetings in Spanish and by offering translation services for parents who have specific requests and needs for the schools.

The organization’s strategy has been to go door-to-door to encourage parents to come to their meetings, which are similar to PTA meetings where parents discuss school policy issues.

“We approach the parents person to person and in their own language. Our culture is such that this is the way to get them to go to events,” Holland said.

The meetings have attracted more than 100 parents at a time from both high schools in the Vista Unified district, Aguirre said, and has received strong support from both the local PTA as well as school officials, including Supt. Rene Townsend.

“They can sell the message to others better than we can sell it. The message at the meetings was everything that I would want to be able to send, but they were doing it so much more effectively,” Townsend said.

“It’s an opportunity for the parents to know the people in the schools and to feel comfortable when they come,” Aguirre said.

Vista High has a strong PTA, but leaders of the group say the national PTA’s strategies for attracting Latinos have failed for them.

A brochure published by the national PTA encourages local units to conduct multicultural programs, publish bilingual brochures and hold meetings to fit the schedules of parents in an effort to attract all parents to the organization.

“We are definitely guided to try to attract Hispanic parents, everything from changing the dates and times of meetings to sharing their culture and that kind of thing, but in reality, it hasn’t worked here,” said Linda Maguire, president of the Vista High PTA.

Maguire said that in the past she has tried to involve Latino parents by mailing flyers in Spanish, making sure a bilingual Latino sits on the local PTA board and holding Mexican cultural events, such as a Cinco de Mayo festival, but to no avail.

“It’s frustrating. You just keep trying to find the key to unlock it, and (the Hispanic Parents Committee) seems to be the key,” Maguire said. “It’s taken off and we’re real pleased, and we just want to do nothing but support it with the long-range goal of being under the same umbrella as PTA.”

Aguirre said it is still uncertain whether her organization will become part of the PTA, although that previously had been one of the committee’s goals.

While the Vista PTA took steps, however doomed, to draw in Latino parents, the countywide PTA concedes that it does not consider such efforts part of its job.

Gelia Cook, president of the district PTA in San Diego County, said the organization’s all-volunteer staff has neither the time nor the resources to address the specific needs of Latino parents.

“We don’t have the tools to do it,” Cook said. “We can’t be all things to all people.”

But other PTA members strongly disagree with Cook.

“PTA doesn’t have to be all things to all people,” said Klumpp of the PTA’s Project HOPE. “PTA has to be one thing to all people: an organization that fulfills its stated goals . . . to promote the welfare of children and youth and to link the home and school, and we have to do that for all children, and if that’s not what PTA is, then I’m in the wrong organization.

“We are dealing with unconscious racism,” Klumpp said. “PTA is failing in their self-appointed task. But there are a lot of people that have deep concern for doing it for all people.”

A state school official who works with culturally diverse groups in San Diego said part of the problem is that the PTA views Latinos as a minority group with different needs, rather than as a large and integral part of the overall community.

“They have to rethink what their target group is and what they can do to include them,” said Rosalia Salinas, director of the California Language Minority Program for the state education department. “Are they culturally sensitive and are they representative of the community? It’s more than just saying, ‘Well, we had a meeting and they didn’t come.’ ”

Countywide, Latinos make up 26% of the student population from kindergarten through 12th grade. Whites make up only slightly more than half of those students--54%.

Cook said the PTA’s strategy is to use other organizations who work with the Latino community to spread information about how to get parents involved in schools.

“We recognize that other groups do it and in a far better way with paid manpower,” Cook said.

But others feel the PTA’s difficulty in reaching out stems from the organization’s attitude and roots.

“Isn’t it time that we change and develop the tools to serve all of our parents?” Aguirre said. “Changes are inevitable, and it’s time we made some changes. We have this tremendous growth of other people in the U.S. When are we going to realize that they are part of our world?”

The same view is held by Mardirosian, whose Parents Institute has been introduced to 30 schools in the county over the last three years and is the largest single effort to draw Latino parents into San Diego County schools.

“The PTA is an outgrowth of the school system educating the parents, and they have not been good communicators to most of the Hispanic parents,” he said.

“The PTA has to learn how to do the job more effectively, they have to learn how to communicate better with people who speak a different language, who come from a different culture and who are on a different socioeconomic level.”

In many of the city of San Diego’s barrio schools, the PTA simply does not exist.

Sherman Elementary, a school with an Latino population of 85% and only 5% white student population, has not had a PTA unit for more than 10 years, choosing instead to become involved with the Parents Institute.

“The PTA wasn’t meeting the unique needs of this community,” said Cecilia Estrada, principal of Sherman Elementary. “There are so many regulations, and the PTA is a bureaucracy and aren’t allowed to do things differently.”

For example, the PTA limits the number of fund-raisers a local PTA can have in any year with limitations on what the funds can be spent on, Estrada said.

Estrada said she had been involved in a predominantly white, middle-class school where the PTA had brought tremendous expertise to the school, but that in her present school the PTA simply did not address the needs of parents.

“The PTA has its place in some schools and works well, but it seems that in Hispanic schools, we have different needs. Here there are more basic needs such as setting up literacy courses for parents, and we have a lot of parents who are new to the educational system so we need to educate them in that,” Estrada said.