Center at Vaughn Campus Makes School a Family Affair : Experiment: Health and social services are made available to those in the poverty-ridden area, in the hopes of breaking children’s cycle of failure.

It began with a 10-year-old child expelled from school for ditching.

When school officials turned down the frantic mother’s pleas for another chance, she knew where to turn for help.

At the Family Center on campus, she told her story to a parent advocate who agreed to intercede. The deal he made was that to get back in school, her son would have to take counseling and she would have to join a parenting class.

In the sessions that followed, other tensions surfaced. The woman’s 16-year-old daughter was abusing her own 2-year-old. And a disciplinarian father was demoralizing his two sons, contributing to their problems in school.

Now, the daughter is in parenting classes, too, and has started working part time at the family center. The father and mother are receiving counseling. The boy is doing better in school.

This fantastic-sounding story happened at Vaughn Street Elementary School. It is a prime example arising from an experiment there to show that the delivery of comprehensive health and social services through a school-based program can improve students’ performance and even lift a community up by its own bootstraps.

The Vaughn Family Center is a one-stop resource for the predominantly Latino and poor families whose children attend Vaughn.

Occupying a two-room bungalow on campus, the center distributes food and clothing, connects children and parents to benefits such as Medi-Cal and welfare, enlists the help of other community agencies for child care and health care and involves parents in helping their children in school.

If the services parents need don’t exist, the Family Center tries to create them, using resources at hand, including the parents. When the center opened, there were no licensed day-care providers in the Vaughn attendance area. So the center formed a partnership with the Child Care Resources Center to train families how to set up day care in their homes. So far 20 families have been licensed, providing 102 new spaces for Vaughn families. A new training session is held every two months.

Other Vaughn parents worked with a health educator from Olive View Medical Center to develop a curriculum for prenatal care. Now parents are being trained as lay health educators to teach pregnant women in the community.

The hope is that this focused investment in one of the Valley’s most poverty-impacted schools will break cycles of failure, saving money in the future.

“We’re experimenting with different ways of getting services to people much earlier and using a lot more paraprofessionals and community volunteers,” said Dorothy Fleisher, planning director of United Way’s North Angeles Region, which co-sponsors the Family Center. “If we’re successful, it should cut costs at the other end: dropout rates, being unemployed, winding up on AFDC (Aid for Families With Dependent Children), the cost of being in jail.”

The Vaughn experiment was born three years ago out of a collaboration of United Way’s North Angeles Region and the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a business alliance that channels private donations into educational reform. Both agencies were independently exploring the problem of social barriers to education. They decided to start a model project.

Vaughn offered the perfect laboratory. It had the worst test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was one of California’s 64 lowest-achieving schools, ranking in the 20th percentile statewide in language achievement.

Its educational deficiencies reflected social conditions of the school community. Ninety-six percent of Vaughn students were eligible for the federally subsidized free lunch program and, therefore, were considered to be eligible for Medi-Cal. Yet few had signed up. Nearly 80% of them suffered acute dental problems. Nearly 90% were Spanish speaking with English-language deficiencies.

A more positive factor in the choice of Vaughn was its new principal, Yvonne Chan. Assigned in May, 1990, she quickly established herself as a high-energy, media-savvy administrator who wanted to make the school a model for educational change.

Chan lobbied aggressively to bring the program to Vaughn, assuaging teachers’ fears that it would drain resources from the classroom or dilute their authority.

The program got off the ground in 1991 with a funding package that included a $160,000 planning grant from United Way, $200,000 from the California Department of Education and grants from several corporations.

A governance system was established in which parents joined school staff and representatives from United Way and the educational partnership in hiring as director Yoland Trevino, formerly director of Bienvenidos, a shelter for infants and toddlers who are court dependents.

Relations between the Family Center and the school have evolved with some rough spots, Chan said. Early on, she set up meetings between the social workers and teachers to smooth out differences in their viewpoints. Still, there were conflicts.

“Teacher says, ‘You’re suspended,’ social workers would say, ‘My poor dear, did you get breakfast?’ ” Chan said. “These two things will kill each other and I’m in the middle.

“There was a time with the Family Center overstepping bounds with teachers,” Chan said. “There were grievances filed with administration. There were disagreements between teachers and staff, parents and teachers, teachers and teachers. We’ve lived through all of those rough waters.”

Now, she said, the governance of the Family Center and school have merged into a smoothly functioning unit overseeing a campus that assumed nearly complete control over its own destiny this fall by becoming the Valley’s first state-chartered school, renamed the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center.

“They are a part of us,” Chan said. “Family Center is not separate.”

Yet it is distinctly different. It is a place where parents are the center of attention.

Trevino included parents in filling out her staff of five community liaisons, three family advocates, a family counselor and an administrative assistant. Four-fifths of those hired were parents who first became involved in the program as volunteers.

The community liaisons, paid $320 monthly for 53 hours, generally volunteer full days, Trevino said. They take charge of the clothes closet and the food pantry, coordinate child care and bilingual counseling, help parents fill out forms for services and organize events.

The family advocates visit each family that comes to the center for help and work out a case plan under the supervision of the licensed family counselor. This can include connecting family members with community resources, helping them get benefits such as Medi-Cal, providing transportation and just listening, Trevino said.

Currently, about 140 families are in case plans. Among them, 120 have qualified for twice-monthly federal food supplements, 40 have received housing support, and 40 have entered substance abuse treatment programs.

All the parents are asked to contribute something in return, from sweeping up around the center to organizing school events, Trevino said.

The Family Center has proven resourceful in the use of volunteers to expand existing community services. El Nido Family Centers in Pacoima provided a trainer who taught parents the importance of reading to their children and showed them skills for creative reading.

“This gives the parent an opportunity to find their own inner child and to strengthen the relationship,” Trevino said. “We now have grandparents that are reading to their grandchildren.”

Trevino next plans to train other parents as reading trainers so they can spread the “Motherread” program to other schools in the Northeast Valley.

Volunteers also teach computer classes, Spanish literacy, English as a second language and a Spanish class aimed at the school’s African-American parents.

So far, the Vaughn experiment has produced encouraging results. Students tested in Spanish have increased their scores from under the 10th percentile to above the 30th, Chan said. Mobility--the rate at which students transfer in and out of the school--has dropped from nearly 70% to less than 40%. There are now 34 students in gifted programs, compared to none before.

Conceding that much of the evidence of their success is anecdotal, however, Fleisher, the planning director for United Way’s North Angeles Region, said she is seeking backing to conduct a long-term cost/benefit analysis.

“Is this model saving money? It’s complicated to figure that,” she said. “Sometimes these programs in the short run are using benefits more. In the long run they may not.”

At the least, it will take years to track dropout rates as children move to higher grades and to measure the degree to which they grow into productive adults or place a future burden on the social system.

More immediately, the Vaughn experiment continues to face obstacles--particularly financial--to setting its most ambitious plans in action.

A primary goal--extending quality medical care to all Vaughn families--has been particularly challenging.

Blue Cross of California funded planning for a health insurance program, but so far the program has not gotten off the ground, Fleisher said. Decisions have yet to be made on such questions as whether all family members would be insured, or just the schoolchildren, and which medical services should be provided on campus.

Meanwhile, in January, Blue Cross will pay for a nurse practitioner to visit the school twice a week, Trevino said. The company also will enroll several Vaughn families in its CaliforniaKids program, providing complete health coverage for $25 per year for up to four children and $10 for each child beyond that. The program is for families who aren’t eligible for Medi-Cal but can’t afford private health insurance. As it turned out, though, only a few qualify because 80% of Vaughn’s students are eligible for Medi-Cal, having been born in the United States. Many don’t know that, though, or are reluctant to apply for government assistance, leading to inevitable crises.

‘We’ve had families that come in with horrendous doctor bills for whatever emergency,” she said. “They say, ‘Please, can you do something because they’re pestering us.’ ”

The assault on dental problems also is moving slowly. Currently all Vaughn students receive an annual screening by a dentist from UCLA. Only those with the most urgent problems can be treated at the overburdened Parent Teacher Student Assn. dental program at nearby Telfair Elementary School.

Trevino has received a donation of two used dental chairs and hopes to convert a bathroom on campus into a clinic staffed by volunteer dentists.

“The cost is astounding,” she said. “We’re going to need something like $20,000 to do that, and we don’t have that kind of money.”

In fact, the Family Center faces a struggle just to ensure its own existence.

Its primary funding from the State Department of Education expires after one more year. Proposals will be written for new sources of money. But, in the end, proponents of the experiment are counting on a shift in public policy to come to the rescue.

“Some of the thinking is to get agencies to redirect resources,” Fleisher said.

The Department of Children’s Services, for example, might find that it has enough Vaughn children in its caseload to provide a social worker at the school.

“United Way’s intent is really to demonstrate that by doing business differently, we can get better outcomes,” Fleisher said.

Until those outcomes can be proved conclusively, a little faith may be required.

“The only way this thing is going to work is for the public to say we’re convinced this method is cost effective, so we’re going to fund people to do this,” Fleisher said.