WOODLAND HILLS : Faculty to Be Bused to Meet Parents

Faculty members at Taft High School are taking a version of their Back to School Night on the road.

Convinced that parental involvement is key to a good education, the teachers and administrators of the Woodland Hills school will meet parents and tour the neighborhoods where nearly half of their students live, an hour bus ride away in South-Central Los Angeles.

Every year the school hosts a Back to School Night--an evening when teachers introduce themselves to parents and explain their curriculum.

Last year, only about a dozen parents out of the more than 1,100 students who live in Watts, Gardena, Pico-Union, South Central and East Los Angeles attended.

David Jay, an English teacher in charge of curriculum and staff development at Taft, coordinated the Oct. 18 event after discussions with teachers and students.

“Students had a sense that teachers weren’t familiar with the kinds of lives they lived and how their lives would influence their ability to work at school,” Jay said. “This is a way to acquaint everyone with their experience.”

As one of four staff development days the school has each year, about 120 teachers and clerical staff will tour the South-Central and East Los Angeles neighborhoods in three buses and then greet parents at Jefferson High School.

“We want to demonstrate our concern and indicate the importance of parental involvement,” Jay said. “There is a strong conviction that our schools are in trouble because parents are not as involved in the process as they used to be. We have to find new solutions.”

Aletha Jarrett, who lives in South-Central and has a son attending Taft, said she was in favor of the event from the moment she heard about it.

Jarrett said her son wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and doesn’t return home until 7:30 p.m., enduring an hour commute each way. That some of his teachers were unfamiliar with his neighborhood, she said, was sometimes reflected in how they treated him.

“Just because he comes from the ghetto doesn’t mean he is the ghetto,” she said. “If you don’t know what’s here and you don’t associate with it, all you’re going to do is assume.”