School Uses Touch Tone to Reach Out to Parents : Education: Homework information for classes at Los Naranjos Elementary of Irvine is but a phone call away.

Parents and pupils at an Irvine school have heard the future of homework and it sounds like this:

Ring. Click. “Hellooo! Thank you for calling Los Naranjos School Parent Information Hotline. . . . Please enter your two-digit class number to receive information from your child’s teacher at any time during this message.”

Amid the contemporary rat race, in which the rats often seem to be winning, computerized voice mail is the latest effort to help harried parents and teachers connect--a move seen by many as crucial to improving student achievement.

So far, about 40 schools in a dozen states are experimenting with 24-hour-a-day call-in systems. Irvine’s homework hot line, installed four weeks ago, is the first in California.

Already, it is a success, said Bruce Baron, principal of Los Naranjos Elementary School.

“With 480 students at the school, we were getting 400 to 420 calls a night,” he said.

By calling the hot line on a touch-tone telephone and punching in a designated teacher code, callers hear messages such as this from kindergarten teacher Jane Holm:

“We had a fun Halloween day today. We made and ate pumpkin cookies. Ask your child what is round and orange. Then ask what is round and orange and has a face. . . .

“Also sort their Halloween candy by type and size and shape.”

And from fifth-grade teacher Dinah Osborne:

“For the spelling contract that’s due tomorrow, parents give a pre-test tonight. Please check over spelling sentences. In reading, we’re finding out how a Chinese man is going to be innovative, even though he’s blind. Tonight they will read the scenes.”

By pressing other numbers on the menu, parents can hear a monthly calendar update, PTA information, school site council information and a monthly principal’s message. The system can be programmed to dial parents’ homes with emergency messages about unscheduled school closings or late buses.

It does not allow parents to leave their own messages for the teacher. “We’ve got a secretary to take messages,” which discourages crank callers, Baron said.

The $10,000 system, a product of Nashville-based Advanced Voice Technologies, was underwritten by Pacific Telesis and Wells Fargo foundations as part of a school restructuring project.

Of all the methods Baron has tried to reach parents, including newsletters and night parent education meetings, “none sets up the same dynamics that this can,” he said. “This is parents as teachers , a real powerful concept.”

Baron, a longtime advocate of parent involvement and co-author of “What Did You Learn in School Today?” has programmed the system primarily for homework messages and what parents can do to help.

“Parents have a greater influence on their child’s success in school than any other factor. Even if they gave a child 15 minutes of undivided attention a day, it’s more than any child’s going to get in school.”

He believes information learned in school lodges in “long-term memory” during the process of summarizing and retelling. “We expect our kids to retain an incredible amount from school. If we don’t give them the opportunity to retell that, then it’s difficult to expect them to retain it in their long-term memory.”

The voice-mail system also reduces evening stress on both parents and children about what the homework assignment actually was. “This completely eliminates the nightly game of ‘To Tell the Truth, or Did You Remember?’ ” Baron said.

Before the homework hot line, Dennis Corbett said he and his wife had to guess what their children, Jim, 7, and Steve, 5, had been assigned for homework.

“Sometimes they’d tell us, sometimes they wouldn’t,” he said. “It got to the point where it was fun to make mom and dad not know. I’d say, ‘So, Jimmy. . . . ‘ and he’d say, ‘I forgot’ even before I’d ask him.”

Now, Corbett said, the family gathers around a speaker phone almost every day to hear what the teacher has to say. Once when they forgot to call, Jim “actually kind of sulked for a day.”

Audrey Lewis said her husband, Joe, who works in Chicago, calls the hot line once a week to keep informed about what his daughter Casey, 5, and son Garrett, 7, who is disabled and mainstreamed, are learning in class. “When he talks to the kids, he can say, ‘oh, did you do this in school?”’

Another parent, Yoko Fujita, said the school program prompted her to switch from a dial to a touch-tone phone.

Research has not yet proven a link between giving homework information to parents and improved test scores of their children, which many consider the bottom line, said Jerold Bauch, an education professor at Vanderbilt University who has been researching electronic communications between the two groups for three years, starting with answering machines.

“To try to isolate the effect of this particular innovation on something as global as student achievement scores in the short term is unlikely,” he said.

However, he said teachers have reported that homework completion rates, and grades based on those rates, “go way up.”

Without the system, teachers typically reach only two or three parents a day, Bauch said.

Among the schools experimenting with such technology, anywhere from a third to half the parents call in daily to retrieve the messages, he said. In one Nashville school, he said, the most frequent callers were low-income parents who had not been involved in other school activities before.

One mother who worked a 4 to 11:45 p.m. shift called the system at night and set out time before breakfast to work with her child, he said.

More important than physically going to the school grounds, Bauch said, is “if teachers and parents have the same information base to support the child’s learning.’

“Face-to-face contact is good. But for busy people, it may be a luxury they cannot afford.”