Cuts May Close Book on Adult Literacy Program

When Lucina Newman immigrated to the United States from a tiny village in Mexico 13 years ago, she spoke no English.

Her former husband discouraged her from learning the language, Newman said, limiting her ability to function in her new culture and help guide her children’s education. For nearly a year, the 34-year-old Ventura housewife has attended adult literacy classes. Now, she finds she can talk to her children’s teachers and assist the children with their homework.

“I know it’s very, very important to know English,” said Newman, who has remarried. “I am hungry to learn. I have three kids, and how can I help them if I don’t know English myself?”

Newman is one of about 800 participants in a county-run adult literacy program targeted for closure because of a pending 40% cut in state funding for the Library Services Agency. Unless the supervisors agree to bail out the agency, the 9-year-old Reading Program for Adults will be eliminated, Library Services Director Dixie D. Adeniran said.

The loss of the literacy program is only one casualty facing her agency, Adeniran said. Without help from the county, the agency will be forced to close six libraries, reducing by half the hours at the remaining nine libraries and buying no new books or materials this fiscal year, she said.

Although these cutbacks are not as bad as feared last month, Adeniran said a 40% slice out of the library budget will force many painful decisions, such as ending the popular literacy program.

She said it will be difficult to come up with the additional $1.3 million needed to save the literacy program and restore closed libraries. She and other library and literacy advocates will make their case before the Board of Supervisors when it commences final budget hearings, beginning Monday.

“The prospect of losing (the literacy program) deeply saddens me,” she said. “Libraries depend on a literate public. Democracy depends on a literate public.”

Since 1984, about 5,000 students at 10 learning sites throughout Ventura County have benefited from instruction, said Pat Flanigan, manager of the literacy program.

Most students in the literacy program hope to improve their ability to interact socially, increase their civic involvement or land a better job.

The typical student is a male in his 30s who is reading at a second-grade level, she said. After months, and sometimes years, of intensive one-on-one tutoring, students emerge not only with refined language skills, but with a new self-confidence, Flanigan said.

When Newman began receiving instruction from tutor Joyce Miller last year, she could not spell her own name. Now she can fill out forms at the doctor’s office and can read about sales in the newspaper, Newman said.

Most important to Newman, however, is her newfound ability to help her three children with schoolwork and other projects.

“I never had the chance to learn until I started this program,” she said.

Tutors, who volunteer their time, have also found their involvement with the program to be rewarding. Barbara Stromberg has been teaching Judy Hody how to read and write twice a week for the past three years.

Hody is a native of China and wanted to be able to converse freely with her co-workers at Unisys Corp., Stromberg said. She said when they began the sessions, Hody could not write full sentences in English and had trouble enunciating words.

But Hody recently checked out her first library book for pleasure reading, Stromberg said. And on the anniversary of their 20th class, Stromberg presented Hody with a thesaurus.

“These students are very motivated,” Stromberg said. “Their will to work and to succeed is just incredible.”

Although there are at least three other adult literacy programs in Ventura County, the county-run program is the largest and serves the widest base of clients at no cost to them, Flanigan said. Residents can attend tutoring sessions at sites in Ventura, Oxnard, Moorpark, Camarillo, Simi Valley and Fillmore.

The county library agency also tutors inmates at the Ventura County Jail and juveniles incarcerated at the California Youth Authority, Flanigan said. For a modest fee, the Sheriff’s Department, several adult schools and a handful of private employers contract for tutoring services from the county, she said.

All of that will be lost if the program is eliminated, said Flanigan, who would lose her $35,000-a-year job. She plans to be among those asking the supervisors to save the program, she said.

“We want to get across how important this is to our students,” she said. “To them, it represents a second chance to become a more productive citizen.”

FYI

In addition to the county-run literacy program, adult literacy classes are also offered at: Blanchard Community Library, 119 N. 8th St., Santa Paula, 525-3615; Laubach Literacy of Ventura County, 181 W. Gonzales Road, Oxnard, 485-0064 and 4474 Market St., Ventura, 650-8287, and Conejo Valley Adult School, 1025 Old Farm Road, Thousand Oaks, 497-2761.