Mother Sues District for Promoting Son : Education: Action charges that officials were negligent in passing child even though he cannot read or write. Instead of damages, she wants school closed.

The mother of a 10-year-old fifth-grader has sued Santa Ana Unified School District for advancing her son through elementary school even though he can not read or write.

Lourdes Gutierrez of Santa Ana charges in a lawsuit filed last week that educators of Glenn Martin Elementary School “wrongfully and unlawfully” failed to properly teach her son, Roberto, causing him tremendous humiliation among his classmates.

In a unique twist, Gutierrez’s suit does not seek monetary damages, but instead asks that the school be closed and that the money used to operate it be given to students in the form of education “vouchers” to pay for admission to private schools.

“I have no idea how they kept passing him at each grade level,” said Gutierrez’s lawyer, Emir Phillips. “It was a total and complete lack of concern on his teachers’ part. . . . How do you pass one homework assignment in the third grade if you can’t read or write?”

Phillips contended that teachers at the school never helped Roberto--whose first language is Spanish--overcome the language barrier in learning English.

Gutierrez said that when she enrolled her son in kindergarten in 1987 she decided against signing him up for bilingual education because she wanted him to learn English, believing it would help him succeed in the future.

Phillips said he filed the case in Orange County Superior Court as a class-action suit because he believes there are other students at the school who are also functionally illiterate as a result of inadequate teaching.

Officials at the elementary school declined to comment, referring all calls to the district office.

Diane Thomas, a spokeswoman for the school district, also declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying that the district had not yet received a copy.

“I can say we are very surprised by the charges,” Thomas said.

She added that the district has “hard-working teachers who are committed to addressing the needs of their students,” particularly Latinos, who make up about 60% of the district’s students.

Gutierrez said, “I’m very, very sad and very, very angry.”

Phillips said Gutierrez had suspicions that her son couldn’t read or write while he was in the second grade, but was told by his teacher that Roberto was “only a little slow and not to worry about it.”

Her suspicions, however, were confirmed in 1990 when she briefly enrolled Roberto in a third-grade class at a school in Corona, a city where Gutierrez planned to move. School officials in Corona tested Roberto and suggested that he be placed back in the first grade because of a learning disability.

But when her moving plans fell through, she re-enrolled Roberto in Glenn Martin, where he was then placed in special education classes. Roberto was retested there by an independent evaluator who concluded that the boy had no learning disabilities, Phillips said.

“He has no learning disability, it was simply that he wasn’t being taught at Glenn Martin,” the attorney said.

Gutierrez alleges that before her son’s illiteracy was discovered, school officials frequently told her that her son was a “good child” who only needed to practice his alphabet, according to the lawsuit. Nothing about his inability to read or write was mentioned, she contends in the lawsuit.

“Many times, at Glenn Martin, Roberto’s homework was never looked at or graded,” the suit alleges. “In school meetings, the teachers never brought up Roberto’s homework as proof of Roberto’s lack of education.”

Roberto did not have attendance or discipline problems at school, the suit maintains.