Parents Filling Gaps in Money-Strapped Schools : Education: Thousands of volunteers step in to instruct students, run libraries and clean grounds.

Like any good teacher, Lori Camparo can rattle off the names of the students who hunt and peck their way through her word-processing assignments every Wednesday in the computer lab at Torrance’s Riviera Elementary School.

She spends hours each week challenging, guiding and sometimes cajoling students to learn skills that could substantially broaden their career choices. And she is deeply concerned about the declining quality of American education.

But Camparo is a member of a new breed of instructors now playing key roles in classrooms throughout the nation. She is a volunteer.

“I have done a lot of work with children in schools and I can say that teachers seem burned out, overworked and underpaid,” said Camparo, a graduate student in psychology whose 8-year-old daughter attends the school.

Educators have been extolling the virtues of parent involvement for decades. But during a time when school districts are increasingly squeezed by shrinking budgets and growing classroom sizes, they have begun to tap into the contributions of volunteers like Camparo as never before.

From the ivy-covered brick schoolhouses in Beverly Hills to the graffiti-scarred campuses that dot South Los Angeles, school volunteers are donating their time and talents for everything from teaching art to running libraries to cleaning school grounds.

Although state education officials have not kept track of exactly how many volunteers aid local schools, many of the state’s largest districts say parent volunteers are playing a larger role than ever before. Today, about half of the state’s 1,048 school districts have organized volunteer programs. And the number grows monthly.

“I can hardly keep up with all the demand for workshops,” said Kay Bergdahl, president of the California School Volunteer Partnership Program, a private nonprofit group that organizes volunteer programs in school districts throughout the state. “With budget cuts, schools need the involvement of the community more and more.”

In many cases, parents are taking time off work to contribute. Many are genuinely worried that without their input and help, teachers in public education are stretched too thin to give their children the kind of individual attention and diverse programming they need to flourish.

Many children at White Point Elementary School in San Pedro, for instance, would have no art instruction if it were not for the efforts of parents like Sherri Jackson, who chairs Art to Grow On, a 4-year-old program that uses parent volunteers to teach art in the classroom.

“Art is obviously something people think we can do without when it comes to (funding cutbacks) in our educational system, but I think we may be missing the boat on that one,” said Jackson, 36. “If children grow up with no art experience at all, I think they become very narrow in what they view as art and they are afraid to express themselves in a creative way. If we don’t nurture some of our creative children, we won’t have our artists in the future, and that’s kind of a scary thought.”

But parents are not confining themselves to classroom clay projects. In some districts, they are stepping in to operate such educational basics as campus libraries.

The Torrance Unified School District, for instance, which has cut about $6 million from its $80-million budget in the last three years, does not have a paid librarian at any of its 17 elementary campuses. Instead, the school libraries are run by more than 100 parent volunteers who raise money for books, rebind the collections and staff the checkout desks.

“The school district just doesn’t have the money to staff elementary school libraries,” said Carol O’Brien, council president of the district’s Parent Teacher Assn. and former school board member. “Parents wanted their kids to have libraries and they decided that the only way they were going to get them was by running them themselves.”

Students at Hermosa Valley School in Hermosa Beach would have had no yearbook this year without the persistence of volunteer Beverly Bordano, who donated 40 hours a week for five months. Funding cutbacks forced school officials to stop offering a class in yearbook production to keep teachers in the core program, said Principal Roger Preuss.

“I would rather (the yearbook) were done as part of the regular program on a pay status for teachers who are trained in language arts, journalism and yearbook,” Preuss said. But he added, “We’re very appreciative of (Bordano’s) efforts. She was here day and night and a lot of weekends and put in a lot more work than we could afford to pay for.”

Teachers say parent volunteers are also becoming crucial cogs in their attempt to provide the most basic educational programs, mostly by helping to maintain a degree of order and consistency in crowded classrooms where all but the most aggressive students are often overlooked. And with little prospect that educational funding will increase in the near future, school districts have no choice but to learn how to get by with less, experts say.

That is especially true at schools with poor, largely immigrant student populations.

“It’s not just because we have so many kids in one classroom, it’s that our (student) population changes so often,” said Judy Hunter, a former second-grade teacher who now works on school improvement projects at Zela Davis Elementary in Hawthorne. “Of the 30 (students) you have at the beginning of the year, you might have five or six left at the end of the year. It’s important to have volunteers to help so teachers can spend time with the new students and the rest of the class is kept on keel.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves more than 640,000 students in some of the poorest--and some of the most affluent--neighborhoods in the county, about 30,000 people volunteered their services during the 1990-91 school year. The district’s school volunteer program started in 1963 with just 60 volunteers.

The volunteer program run by the San Diego Unified School District doubled in size in the last three years. Classrooms throughout the district’s 155 schools received the services of more than 12,000 volunteers last year, compared to about 5,800 in 1989.

And even districts without a formal volunteer program report that a rising number of people are offering to assist at neighborhood schools.

In the last three years, Santa Ana Unified School District--the largest in Orange County--has developed partnerships with 125 companies and provided leadership training to thousands of parents. “We’re having more and more interaction with the business community and individuals within organizations who are saying . . . ‘I want to do something,’ ” said district spokeswoman Diane Thomas.

The most comprehensive examination of school volunteerism was in 1989, when the National Assn. of Partners in Education in Alexandria, Va., estimated that 2.6 million volunteers provided more than $1 billion in goods and services to school districts nationwide.

Education experts nationwide agree that California is among the nation’s leaders in providing programs that foster volunteerism.

Current efforts include legislation pending in the Assembly’s Education Committee that would earmark $5 million for the development of volunteer programs. Senate Bill 1114, sponsored by Sen. Bill Leonard (R-Big Bear), would funnel funding to local organizations that would recruit, train and supervise volunteers who would serve as academic mentors for students who need help in school.

Educators say it is nearly impossible to be effective without such organized programs, especially at schools in poor, minority communities where parents may work two jobs to pay their bills and have little energy or time left over to donate to their children’s classrooms.

“It’s not that our parents aren’t interested and don’t show up,” said Thomas of Santa Ana Unified, which has a student population that is 85% Latino. “Many parents come from a culture that understands schools to be the experts and their interaction would be seen as something negative.”

Daniel Jurenka, assistant superintendent of the largely Latino Lennox School District, agrees: “We don’t have a huge number of parent volunteers in the classrooms, as you typically might have in more middle-class communities, because (this is) a kind of survival economy for our immigrant families.

At Clyde Woodworth Elementary in Inglewood, which is about 65% Latino and 35% black, school administrators have mustered parents for everything from cleaning up the cafeteria to patrolling the campus. But most days, only a few parents visit the school, even though the district has provided a parent center on campus for the past five years.

“We don’t have a contingent of constant volunteers, but we have them when we need them,” said Mabel Redd, the parent center’s community liaison. “Ideally, I would like to see parents in the classroom, in the library, mending books, binding books, helping with storytelling. My dream would be to have parents coming in with performing art programs--music, dance, theater.”

One way school districts have tried to fill the gap is by reaching out to other groups for free help.

Although state educators say parents still make up the largest group of volunteers statewide, grandparents, business professionals, retired people and even high school students are helping out in growing numbers.

Kay Woollett, an 80-year-old former missionary, is a case in point. For the past six years, she and fellow residents of a Long Beach retirement home have spent four hours every Wednesday helping children at nearby Dominguez Elementary learn how to read.

“Most of the youngsters don’t speak English in their homes,” Woollett said. “So we listen to them read aloud and help them or ask questions.”

On the other end of the spectrum is Vanessa Ruelas, a 15-year-old sophomore at San Pedro High, who spent part of her winter break drilling Barton Hill Elementary third-graders on their multiplication tables.

“It made me feel good knowing I was doing something good for students,” said Ruelas, who hopes to go into business or teaching. “I thought they wouldn’t be interested in doing their work, but they were interested. They wanted to learn.”

And James Sanchez of Hawthorne is yet another kind of volunteer. For the past six months, the 34-year-old computer engineer has served as a mentor to a Santa Monica High School junior who aspires to become a doctor.

“I would regard him as bright, but he doesn’t really have the background advantage that a lot of kids going into medicine have,” said Sanchez, president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs. Through his mentoring, Sanchez said he hopes to infuse the youth with the background and confidence he needs to gain admission to medical school.

Schools were not always so eager for outside help.

Torrance resident Bill Adams, a retired aerospace engineer, remembers how he was roundly rebuffed by a Torrance schoolteacher in the early 1970s when he offered to lend a hand in his daughter’s classroom.

“The philosophy then was, ‘Don’t worry about it; we’ll take care of it,’ ” recalls Adams, 62.

Today, the school district that once turned him away now welcomes him onto the campus where he spends several hours a week as a classroom aide in his granddaughter’s kindergarten class. His activities include everything from washing out paint trays and sponges to repairing broken furniture and lights. Once, he even chased down the classroom guinea pig.

The change occurred in the years after Adams’ daughter was a pupil. Schools were struggling to win the trust of parents at the height of desegregation efforts, educators say.

“Parents who might not have been to their neighborhood schools began to come to see that desegregation was working, that their children would be safe,” said Janice Crawford, director of communications for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Inviting parents onto campuses “was a way of dispelling the myths, to show them that their schools were doing OK,” she said.

The doors opened wider still in the 1980s, when business people began to complain that public school graduates did not have the basic writing and computation skills needed for the modern workplace. Parent and community involvement became key elements of school reforms aimed at reversing the trend.

By the time President Bush coined his slogan for widespread volunteerism, hundreds of the country’s “thousand points of light” were already burning in public schools.

Now, business professionals make up the fastest-growing group of volunteers at neighborhood schools, educators say. They are doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, writers and corporate executives. They do everything from tutoring students in math and science to sponsoring creative writing lectures. One Beverly Hills elementary school has enlisted the help of actress Valerie Harper to direct children in improvisational games.

“Part of the reason (business professionals) are coming into the system is that they are finding we are producing graduates who are not quite fulfilling their needs,” said Joni Ferrero, a community representative for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s School Volunteer Program. “A lot of them want to help and share their expertise.”

Although educators praise the contributions made by volunteers, many caution there are limits to what they can do. Despite their talents and enthusiasm, volunteers will never be able to take the place of teachers and paid librarians. And because they are unpaid and untrained, they can be unreliable and the quality of their efforts can be uneven.

“(Schools) need teachers, they need books, they need things schools need,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig. “But even if we had all that, we would still need a strong volunteer program. It’s important not just because of our financial problems, but because of the societal pressures that we’re dealing with today.

“You can’t expect volunteers to solve the problems of the schools,” he added. “But they help.”