Jose Makes the Grade, With Help of Mother

As his mother tells it, Jose Lopez, 13, has always been a quick and voracious learner.

“He wanted to read at an early age,” Ruth Lopez recalled. In school, he would quickly complete his work and want to do more.

In the second grade, Jose was tested for the Gifted and Talented Education program at E. P. Foster Elementary School in Ventura. Now a student at De Anza Middle School, he is entering his sixth year in GATE.

Jose, a shy boy who loves baseball, wants to be a civil engineer after college. It is not a surprising goal, considering the academic success of his five brothers and sisters.

His older brother, John, was a straight-A student at Ventura High School and graduated from California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo. His older sister, Monica, is a scholarship student there now. His other three siblings have excelled as well.

The Lopez children, all bilingual, have grown up in the family’s small, tidy house off Ventura Avenue where groups of children ride bikes and play basketball in the street.

“We didn’t get an education,” Ruth Lopez said tearfully of herself and her husband. “We have tried to instill in them that it is so important.”

She and her husband, John, both attended school to the ninth grade. She is a campus aide at Ventura High School and her husband is a self-employed electrician.

They simply don’t accept academic laziness. When Jose’s 10-year-old brother, David, came home from school with a D in math this year, she hit the roof.

“I know what they’re capable of doing,” she said. Other family members pitched in to tutor David. When the next report card came out, he brought home an A.

Ruth Lopez is certain that without a GATE program, kids like Jose would get bored and get into trouble. Jose is probably too busy to get bored, though, since he spends two periods a day in accelerated classes, where he concedes the work is very difficult.

One recent assignment was a research project on child labor laws.

Jose maintains a 3.85 grade-point average.

He and other GATE students went to Sacramento this year for two days to visit the capital. He also won a scholarship to attend GATE camp this spring in Santa Barbara with students from across the state.

There, the challenges were varied, he said. In one exercise, students were given straws, napkins, plastic wrap and string and told to figure out how to drop an egg two stories without breaking it. Some fashioned parachutes for the eggs; others devised cushioning.

“Ours broke,” he said.

At the camp he also took leadership classes and learned, among other things, a little bit about public speaking.

Being a GATE student at De Anza hasn’t been devoid of razzing from his peers.

“Sometimes they say, ‘Oh, you’re in GATE, you must be smart,’ ” he said. “They think our class is way smarter than the others. Sometimes they make fun. I don’t like that.”