Teacher Gives the Advice She Never Got

During conferences with parents, Yolanda Gonzalez McComb, a third-grade teacher, urges them to begin talking to their children about going to college.

McComb says parents tell her, “My God, they’re only 8 years old.”

And she responds: “That’s the difference between our families and other families. There are families who have this as dinner conversation from the time the children are 5.”

For McComb, chosen as one of two Teachers of the Year in the Fullerton school district a few months ago, a big part of teaching is educating parents.

In her essay for Teacher of the Year, McComb said she believes in an “active partnership between school and home” and that “students need long-term educational goal-setting.”

Those two things may seem obvious to many parents in Orange County schools. But McComb, who works at Richman Elementary School, said that isn’t always the case with her students and their parents, most of them Latinos, many of whom are much more comfortable speaking Spanish than English.

The dropout rate for Latino youths continues to be higher than for Anglo children nationwide. And McComb said that her own background and her 10 years of teaching have shown her that for some families, simple economic survival is such a looming priority that little attention is given to what may happen 10 or 20 years down the road.

McComb grew up in East Los Angeles and was raised by a single mother who worked as a seamstress at an upholstery shop and at a dry cleaners to support her four children. McComb said her mother instilled in the children a willingness to work hard and to be responsible and gave them a strong sense of family.

But what was missing, she said wistfully, was talk of long-range goals and about how an education would allow them to choose their own destinies.

McComb is the only college graduate of the family. One brother dropped out of high school a few months before graduation to go to work.

“My mother was doing the best she could, and she cared for our well-being,” she said.

But she sees the same thing in families of her students, where the day-to-day worries about where the next meal will come from dominate their existence.

Her entire school, McComb said, works on the philosophy of trying to bring parents into the school more. While there is no official Parent-Teacher Assn., meetings organized by the school are now drawing up to 175 parents. Meetings are held in three languages--English, Spanish and Vietnamese. And many on the school staff are bilingual, from the principal to many of the clerks in the front office.

For these children, McComb says, perhaps it will be different.

“I see this as a mirror image of where I grew up,” she said. “But I don’t think the parents here don’t want to help their kids. They just need to be informed.

“And the kids want to learn so much,” she added. “A lot of the kids beg me to let them take pencils home with them because they don’t have any at home.”