Helping Parents Help Kids : Schools: L.A. Unified District offers a program to teach mothers and fathers that, no matter how poor their own education, they can make a difference in their children’s.

Ana Mejia, a Salvadoran immigrant who works as a sewing machine operator in Sun Valley, considers herself a concerned parent.

But speaking little English, Mejia has not felt comfortable consulting teachers about the academic progress of her 11- and 13-year-old sons. Helping them with their homework is virtually out of the question.

“When they ask me questions in math, I don’t know the answers,” Mejia, who only received a fifth-grade education in El Salvador, said in Spanish.

That is why Los Angeles Unified School District officials, backed by funding from a Monrovia-based relief agency, have embraced the Parent Institute for Quality Education, a weekly night class that teaches parents like Mejia that--no matter how little formal learning they have--they can make a difference in their children’s education.

Like Ana Mejia, experts say, many Latino parents--particularly immigrants--feel helpless when it comes to playing an educational role. Some do not understand how the American educational system works. Others feel intimidated because of their own lack of education.

Studies have repeatedly shown that when parents take an active interest, their children perform better in school, officials say.

“The message is simple,” said Vahac Mardirosian, a Baptist minister who founded the nonprofit institute in San Diego five years ago. “The schools, by themselves, cannot educate children. The home and the schools working in collaboration will ensure a better product.”

Mardirosian, who has been involved with Latino educational issues since the student walkouts of the 1960s, developed the institute program in the hope of reducing dropout rates among Latino students.

Now the institute offers its free course on more than 30 campuses each year in the San Diego area. The program has won accolades from San Diego school officials for bolstering parental involvement in the educational process.

In January, with a grant from the Christian relief and development organization World Vision, Mardirosian introduced his program to Los Angeles, where school district officials hope it will produce similar results.

In March, 174 parents of students in Highland Park’s Buchanan Street Elementary School graduated from the course.

Currently, more than 140 parents, including Mejia, are enrolled in the program at Glassell Park’s Fletcher Drive Elementary School. Another 170 are taking the course at 4th Street School in East Los Angeles.

Raised in Mexico by Armenian parents, Mardirosian believes many Latino immigrants--particularly those from poor countries--place too much faith in the schools alone, and discount their own influence on their children’s education.

That, he argues, helps explain the difference between the percentages of Latino and Anglo students who complete high school. In the spring of 1991, the dropout rate of Latino high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District was 41.7%, compared to 26.2% for Anglos.

“Latino parents trust the school system more than other people,” Mardirosian said. “Parents see the schools here, they look very nice, very solid. Everybody who works in the school has a college degree, and they think: ‘I have a second- or a third-grade education. What can I do to add to these experts?”’

His answer--delivered over and over during the course--is that parents can do a lot.

Each session features a blend of pep talk, psychology lessons, and common sense advice on such topics as how the school system works, discipline, preparing children for college, communication, self-esteem and cultural conflict.

And, although he developed the program with Latinos in mind, Mardirosian said the lessons are appropriate for all parents.

“The base of a good education is what comes from the home,” the 67-year-old minister emphatically told about 50 Fletcher Drive Elementary parents recently.

“Encourage work,” he said in Spanish. “Ask your child to do the homework while you are watching. That way, the child knows that the parent understands that his work is important.”

By coming to class each week, the parents also start to feel more comfortable being on the school campus, so that if their children should have a problem, they may be more willing to return to consult with teachers, Mardirosian said.

Cal State Northridge history professor Julian Nava, who served on the Los Angeles Board of Education for 12 years, agreed that Latino parents--particularly immigrants--may be reluctant to get involved in their children’s schools out of respect for the teachers.

Many Latin Americans have “confidence in the schools, that the schools are going to do the job which the parents are admittedly not capable of doing,” he said.

So far, there is evidence that Mardirosian’s program is helping change some of those attitudes.

Buchanan Street School Principal Javier Sandoval said that after parents completed the program, many came to him and said, “Now I feel I can express my concerns.”

Dalia Cervantes, who has a 13-year-old son at Eagle Rock High School, said that after taking the course at Buchanan, she went to her son’s school and introduced herself to the principal, and to all of her son’s teachers. Her son’s schoolwork, she said, has been improving steadily ever since.

“Now my son says, ‘Oh my God, my mom and the principal are friends,’ ” Cervantes said. “He’s doing a little better now, because he sees that I have taken some action.”

Four more schools will offer the course in July. And World Vision officials say they have committed $2 million to bring it to campuses throughout the Los Angeles district over the next four years.

“We know, statistically speaking, that in the Latino community 50% of the kids are not going to graduate,” said Luis Madrigal, director of Latino programs for World Vision. “We feel that we can intervene through this program. The Parent Institute has a proven track record. It’s not a guessing game. We know that it’s going to work.”