Treating Schools Like Family

When the principal of Glen Alta Elementary School asked Andy Vargas if he’d be willing to “adopt” the Lincoln Heights school in 1985, Vargas paused for a moment and then asked: “How many children do you need me to take home?”

After being assured that adopting a school simply meant helping students, the 66-year-old businessman made it a crusade. With limited resources, he established a college scholarship fund at the school by sponsoring an annual menudo breakfast and a golf tournament and by collecting thousands of aluminum cans.

In 1988, while struggling to raise money for his cause, Vargas won $5.28 million in the California Lottery and immediately contributed $20,000 of his first annual post-taxes check of $190,000 to the foundation.

“I think when people told me I couldn’t do it, it gave me more motivation,” said Vargas, who has raised $70,000 and will award the first 15 scholarships this summer. “It’s one of the best things that has ever happened to me to see the kids get this.”

Vargas is one of 1,000 individuals and businesses now participating in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Adopt-a-School program, which is designed to increase community involvement in a school system that is both broke and suffering from a lack of public confidence. Along with contributing $15 million over the past 15 years, Adopt-a-School participants mentor students, sponsor attendance programs and participate in many other educational projects at 700 of the district’s 855 schools.

Before last year’s riots, district officials said they were lucky to receive three calls a week from businesses and residents inquiring about how they could get involved in the schools. Since the riots, the district has averaged two calls a day.

“After the riots, we got a lot of apologetic calls from people who said, ‘Education is the key. We want to do something,’ ” said Eiko Moriyama, an adviser in the district’s Adopt-a-School office who has helped organize 200 new partnerships since the riots.

“The trend has been companies looking for inner-city schools, but we’ve had trouble making adoptions in the inner-city because there’s not a lot of big businesses there. It’s not always convenient for companies to send employees there.”

While critics credit Adopt-a-School with introducing businesses to the schools, they say companies should take the relationship further and tackle some of the district’s more complicated financial and educational problems. They say businesses should lobby on the district’s behalf, and offer administrators advice on how to run the schools more efficiently.

But others say business involvement should focus on the children.

“It’s not things but people we need,” said Alvis Andrews, principal of Grape Street Elementary School in Watts. “We live in an environment where self-esteem is low, and when people from the community come here, it validates the youngsters’ self-worth. They feel like someone out there thinks they’re important.”

Los Angeles’ Adopt-a-School program, the largest in the country, grew from a partnership initiated by the Atlantic Richfield Co. with the 10th Street Elementary School in 1978. Since then, hundreds of new participants have come on board, contributing an average of $28,000 per company, according to a 1989 Adopt-a-School survey.

On a recent afternoon, Arco’s Jim McCreary, a corporate real estate manager, sat in a conference room on the 49th floor of the Downtown Arco building while Angel Pantaleon, a junior at Manual Arts High School, worked on an algebra problem. Most employees had gone home for the day, but McCreary stayed into the evening making sure Pantaleon mastered his math lesson.

“When I first came (to Arco), I was shy and did not feel comfortable,” said Pantaleon, whose math average has jumped from a D to a B over the past two months. “But after we started to do math, we became like friends. I feel like I’m doing better in math because I understand it more and I’m getting more attention.”

McCreary is one of 80 Arco employees participating in a Joint Education Project with Manual Arts, Berendo Middle School and 10th Street and Hoover Street elementary schools. Along with allowing employees to spend two hours a week working with students, Arco provides transportation to and from the schools.

“The company makes it so easy for you to do it that there’s no reason not to do it,” said financial consultant Joanne Cech, who has mentored students for the past decade. “Especially after the riots, we all felt so helpless. This is just a little thing we can do.”

It’s difficult for Cech to talk about the program without bringing up her experiences working with Angela Salcedo, now a freshman at UC Riverside.

While tutoring Salcedo as a fifth-grader, Cech encouraged the girl to take a test that would qualify her for the district’s gifted and talented program. Salcedo passed the test and immediately switched into advanced classes.

During her senior year of high school, Salcedo turned to Cech when she needed advice about college. In addition to helping Salcedo fill out her college applications and financial-aid forms, Cech wrote a recommendation on Salcedo’s behalf.

“No one in my family went to college or knew anything about things like that,” said Salcedo, who grew up in Pico-Union. “So it meant a lot to have someone help me out.”

Companies interested in adopting a school can set up a partnership through Moriyama’s office or with the school directly. Moriyama said she often matches a business with a school, depending on the type of program the company wants to establish and the kind of students they want to work with.

For instance, the consulting firm of McKinsey & Co. decided to adopt Hollenbeck Middle School in Boyle Heights because it wanted to work with low-income students who had low reading scores.

“They requested extensive information about test scores because they’re a company that helps a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and this is (the type of research) they do with their own clients,” Moriyama said.

Although there are no financial or time obligations, the district encourages adopters to cultivate a long-term relationship--a task that isn’t always easy to accomplish.

Andrews said when a branch of the U.S. Postal Service first adopted his school in 1990, postal workers enthusiastically established a writing program in which students sent each other letters through a school post office. But the partnership did not last.

“We haven’t been in close contact with them this past year because the person who was in charge of that is working in another capacity,” Andrews said. “Businesses need to have a person in charge of the program or else you lose continuity.”

As the popularity of the Adopt-a-School program grows, Moriyama said many individuals have been coming up with creative ways to get involved in the schools.

In lieu of porcelain, china and other traditional wedding gifts, Laurene Williams and Wolfgang Aichholz told their friends to write checks to Greenpeace, the L.A. Mission or South Park Elementary. The Topanga Canyon couple adopted the South-Central school because Williams grew up in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, but was able to attend a prestigious New York City high school and then Yale University on scholarships.

“Laurene was a beneficiary of programs like this, and we felt that it was more important for us to give something back” than receive wedding gifts, said Aichholz, a musician. “We’re not rich or anything, but we get by with what we have.”

Williams, who is a writer, said the $540 raised for South Park Elementary will be used to buy books for the school’s reading program. “I went to an (economically) depressed elementary school, but I always read as a small child,” she said. “I could tell that it made a difference because I inherited a sense of discipline. A lot of minorities think the system can’t work for us, but that’s not always the case.”

Sharon Langman, principal of 98th Street School, said the only thing that has kept her staff’s morale from plummeting this past year has been the school’s partnership with the U.S. Customs Service.

Customs officials, who adopted the school in the fall, took one look at the dilapidated campus and decided to plant a garden for the students and paint over the school’s chipped walls.

On a recent afternoon, three federal agents had taken time off from work to volunteer at the school. One agent played basketball with a group of students, while another read a story to a class of kindergartners. Another agent helped a boy test out his science project on the school playground.

“Every time, we come here, the kids say, ‘Yay!’ and clap their hands,” said Sonia Garcia, a customs inspector. “They always have a lot of questions about what we do at work.”

While no one denies that Adopt-a-School has resulted in many heartwarming relationships, critics say businesses too often are satisfied with their Adopt-a-School efforts and are ignoring the district’s larger problems.

“When crime statistics leap upward, the response of the business community has been, ‘Let’s raise money for the police department,”’ said Ray Reisler, a former assistant to the U.S. Commissioner of Education. “When the school chief says, ‘Kids are dropping out, our schools are dilapidated, we need more money,’ the business community says, ‘No, we want to see you do better with what you have.’ ”

Local business leaders point to their participation in the group Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) as their major attempt to help the local school system. The school board has approved the LEARN plan, which would shift some decision-making from the district’s central administration to local campuses.

But in terms of achieving comprehensive school reform, Reisler said Los Angeles’ efforts pale in comparison to other urban areas.

For instance, in Cincinnati, 25 chief executive officers formed the Cincinnati Business Committee, which lobbies on behalf of the district and sends employees to help the district balance its budget and offer advice on how to manage various departments.

In 1991, the group issued its report on the district, which included many recommendations on how the district could cut its bureaucracy through restructuring, said Ronald Roberts, executive director of the committee. The district later announced that it planned to follow the recommendations and would save $16 million over two years by doing so.

“Adopt-a-School is a great supplementary process to marry corporations and schools, but it doesn’t try to change the existing structure,” Roberts said. “I believe the business community ought to help in a major way because education is the key to this country’s success.”

Jose Castro, a vice president at Bank of America and past chairman of the Los Angeles Adopt-a-School Council, said the council has been trying to encourage businesses to beef up their involvement in education, but it’s not a simple task.

“There has been criticism of the Adopt-a-School model, but it still serves a very critical purpose,” Castro said. “Companies just becoming involved in the schools aren’t going to take on issues like school reform right away. Adopt-a-School provides a transition so they can move on to further involvement.

“We want to continue to develop new relationships and expand or enhance our existing relationships,” he said, “but everything takes time.”

Adopt-a-School

This is where the chatter will go. This is where the chatter will go. This is where the chatter will go.

* SETTING UP A PROGRAM--After selecting a possible school to adopt, business representatives meet with the school principal to discuss what type of program would be most beneficial.

* TYPES OF ACTIVITIES--Businesses have participated in tutoring, lectures, career counseling, internship programs, providing attendance incentives, and sponsoring parent workshops and teacher workshops. Partnerships also have involved companies providing computer training for the school’s staff, helping students fill out job applications and setting up mock interviews, and employees speaking at school career days.

* TO ADOPT A SCHOOL--Call the Partnerships office of the Los Angeles Unified School District, (213) 625-6989.