Oakland Schools Try to Recover : Education: Programs attempt to vanquish problems stemming from poverty and district’s fiscal ills. One controversial course pays parents to help their children with schoolwork.

Every Wednesday night for 11 weeks, Gloriadean Jones-Cooper loaded five of her children onto a city bus and rode with them to Webster Elementary School to attend the Oakland Unified School District’s experimental course in parenting.

The district provided supper, baby-sitting and $150 to parents who attended all sessions and met at least one goal they set for themselves at the beginning of the program.

Much has been made of the course’s unusual pay-for-parents feature, but Jones-Cooper said she and her eight classmates gladly would have attended for free.

“I gave the money to my kids,” Jones-Cooper said. “I got so much from this, and it was not about the money at all.”

The program is part of a multifaceted, communitywide effort to address what school officials call the “life circumstances” of its students. Ninety-one percent of Oakland’s 50,000 students are minorities, with blacks, at 59%, making up the largest group. Officials estimate that about half the students live in poverty, and pupils from families receiving federal welfare grants account for 70% of students at eight elementary schools.

It also is part of a bigger effort to help the district heal its fiscal and administrative ills as well as improve the educational program in poverty-stricken areas.

“The school district needs to take a leadership role in addressing the needs of students and their families,” said Paul Brekke-Miesner, program coordinator for the district’s Comprehensive Health and Safety Plan.

“If we don’t do something about the environment many of our students grow up in--poverty, crime, drug abuse--the best academic program in the world won’t work,” said Brekke-Miesner, whose office works closely with other community organizations to stretch tight dollars and coordinate services.

Using $1.4 million in federal and state grants, the district operates programs that include putting full-time social workers into 14 schools, teaching youngsters ways to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence, and running a peer education and mentoring program in which teachers and high-achieving students work closely with those who are foundering.

The district along with a coalition of social service agencies recently launched a program to operate a range of health, welfare and other programs at several elementary schools. Gov. Pete Wilson has called for a similar program linking social services to schools.

Also, the district’s Castlemont High School was one of six in California to get a three-year state grant for comprehensive anti-drug programs. Castlemont’s $900,000 award will go toward prevention efforts that include vocational and educational development projects, community and parent education, peer support groups and youth activities.

Helping families improve their circumstances is one component of a widely backed project that has as its goal the formidable task of turning around the state’s sixth-largest school district, long plagued by well-publicized financial difficulties, charges of corruption among employees and dismal dropout rates and achievement test scores.

Little more than a year ago, there were highly critical state audits of the district’s administration and criticism that the school board meddled in day-to-day operations and engaged in patronage. Several employees had been charged with stealing from the district, which had run through six superintendents in as many years. Then-Assemblyman Elihu Harris was calling for the state Department of Education to take over the system.

“We had hit rock bottom,” said Angela Glover Blackwell, a co-chair of the Commission for Positive Change in the Oakland Public Schools, a group formed in the summer of 1989 to seek community consensus on what should be done.

Many of the commission’s findings were incorporated in a five-year plan to be guided by Supt. Richard (Pete) Mesa, an experienced administrator who arrived in January, 1990, with wider autonomy than had been accorded his predecessors.

Although the district balanced its budget without accepting a state loan, the Department of Education appointed a trustee but limited his powers to advising school officials. The state recently approved the district’s five-year fiscal plan and put the trustee on part-time status.

Harris was elected Oakland mayor last year on an education-reform platform and installed an “education cabinet” to work with the positive change commission and school district. Local businesses also have come aboard, adding political support and corporate dollars to supplement the district’s tight budget.

All this has injected optimism into a district long used to public scorn and bad press.

“There is no question that the community’s efforts were able to get this district to turn the corner,” said Blackwell. “It is going to take a while before we see it in the test scores, but at least we are now headed in the right direction.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig agrees that the district has “cleaned up its act” with regard to its financial and administrative problems, but said improving the educational track record in the most troubled of its schools will be much more difficult.

“There are major problems (affecting the schools) of drugs, gangs, poverty. . . . It’s a real difficult situation for getting performance improvements,” Honig said.

He added: “I think there is a lot more hope for the district than there was a year ago. . . . They have everybody on board, the mayor, the churches, the business community, parents, and that’s what it takes.

“They’ve always had some good teachers and a few outstanding schools, even through all the turmoil, they were winning awards. They have a shot at it, and I don’t think they’re kidding themselves about how hard it will be to get results.”

Mesa, who is pushing for more grants to finance reforms, said the district’s game plan “is not a quick fix, and wouldn’t claim it to be. . . . You cannot improve achievement in just a year or two.”

District officials are counting on projects such as the parenting course to bring results in the long run. Using family counselors and other “facilitators,” the course is designed to help parents become better participants in their children’s education, works on parent-child communication skills, makes participants aware of available resources and encourages them to rely on each other for advice and support.

Barbara Ary said she has seen a big improvement in her sixth-grader son Michael’s attitude and work habits, which suffered after she had to take him out of a private school when the family bought a house in Oakland.

“He didn’t want to participate (in the parent course) at first, but I insisted because I was so tired of the fights we had every night over his homework,” Ary said. “Now he has his homework and his chores done before I get home from work, and we can go over it together. There is much more harmony between us now.”

Paula Barber, program coordinator for the Family Enrichment Network, which runs the parent courses, said word has spread quickly about the program. When a second round of classes was offered this spring at Cox Elementary School, about 50 parents applied for 10 slots.

“For many of these parents, school was not a positive place to be. . . . If we can get them to come and stick it out and then begin to volunteer at their children’s school, as some of our parents have done, we feel we have been successful,” Barber said.

The pay-for-parents aspect has been somewhat controversial.

“I like the program, but I am flat out opposed to paying parents for doing something they ought to be doing anyway,” said Mae Monroe, a longtime Oakland Parent-Teacher Assn. leader.

Others have questioned whether the $15-million to $20-million program is cost-effective.

Brekke-Miesner said the stipend, which represents only a fraction of the program cost, may be dropped if it is found to be unnecessary. To those who complain that the program is too expensive, he throws up a simple statistic.

“Alameda County spends $55 million a year on child protective services and foster care,” he said. “And when you have something that can help prevent those kinds of things, then investing in it makes all the sense in the world.”