Parents Warm Up to Homework Hot Line : Education: An Irvine elementary school’s new voice-mail system is proving an unqualified success at helping harried parents and teachers connect.

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.”

Computerized voice mail is the latest attempt 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 in October, is the first in California.

It is already 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 code, callers hear messages such as this from fifth-grade teacher Dinah Osborne:

“For the spelling contract that’s due tomorrow, parents give a pretest 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. Baron said the school has a secretary who takes messages, which discourages crank callers.

The $10,000 system, a product of Nashville-based Advanced Voice Technologies, was underwritten by Pacific Telesis and Wells Fargo foundations connected with a school restructuring project, a pilot program to improve student achievement.

Los Naranjos was one of three California schools chosen because of its economically and culturally diverse student population. The other schools were in Oakland and Sacramento.

Thirty-five percent of the Los Naranjos student population is made up of minorities, 40% are children of enlisted personnel at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station and 20% are bused from areas that include Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing.

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

The system is not designed to replace face-to-face parent-teacher contact. Instead, Baron said, it will improve communication, so that when parents and teachers do meet, the parents will be more comfortable. “This really takes away the mystery,” he said.

Baron, a longtime advocate of parent involvement and co-author of the book, “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 one-on-one help than most children are 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 stay informed about what his daughter, Casey, 5, and son, Garrett, 7, are learning in class. “When he talks to the kids, he can say, ‘Oh, did you do this in school?’ ”

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

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