Translator Passes Word: Stay in School

Frances Martinez works in the field of education. But she is neither a teacher nor a principal.

Instead, she is a soldier in the trenches, fighting the enemies of education: drugs, family violence, gangs--and yes, even student apathy.

Martinez, a fireplug of a figure, is officially a translator for the Anaheim Union High School District. But what she really does defies abbreviation into a phrase short enough to fit on the door of her snug office.

Her duties as a translator include working as a family outreach worker in the school’s Improvement Office. She has become a bridge between those who want to teach and those students who will do all they can to resist being taught.

Her main job is to keep youths in school, but that is a task of enormous proportions. Sometimes the students don’t make it.

“A lot of times, some of these kids come back and say to me, ‘I should have listened to you.’ And I say, ‘That’s OK, it’s never too late. If you want to get better in life, you have to go to school.’ ”

She mothers her students, nudges them, scolds them, gives them the attention perhaps no one ever has, tracks each student she comes in contact with, along with his or her brothers and sisters. Occasionally she has been responsible for sending them to jail.

“I always have time for them,” she said. “I see the tears coming down, and I close the door and say, ‘OK, let’s talk.’ ”

Martinez works out of Anaheim High School, a venerable campus in a tough part of town, where an 8-foot-high chain link fence serves more to keep the streets at bay than to keep the students in.

Most of the students at the school are Latinos, many of them the sons and daughters of Mexican immigrants.

Because she is an immigrant herself--she was born in Mexico City and grew up in Phoenix--Martinez understands what it is to live in two worlds. She knows that many of the parents of her students at Anaheim do not feel comfortable enough in the English-speaking world to discuss their children’s situations when they are in trouble.

“The most important thing I do for the parents is to call them,” she said. “If a kid is in trouble, I call them and encourage them to come in and talk with the teachers. They say, ‘But I don’t speak English.’

“I say, ‘I’ll help you. I’ll be here.’ ”

In her 17 years with the district--she started off as a teacher’s aide at a junior high school--Martinez has seen a generations’ worth of teen and adolescent problems. What do the youths need most?

“They need a lot of parent guidance,” she said. “They need love.”

Martinez, who has two sons of her own, ages 26 and 28, said she doesn’t know how many times parents have told her that they don’t have time to talk to their children.

“They say, ‘Well, we both work.’ I say, ‘Give him at least 10 minutes a day,’ ” she said.

There are many unhappy endings, but plenty of happy endings too. She said her reward comes in seeing them graduate.

“That’s when I have my tears,” she said. “I say to them, ‘Now, go out in the world and do something constructive.’ ”