Oxnard School Board Plans Bilingual Meeting : Education: Elementary panel’s discussion tonight will be in Spanish and English. It’s part of an effort to get more parents involved.

To shore up eroding involvement by parents, the Oxnard elementary school board tonight will conduct its twice-monthly meeting simultaneously in Spanish and English.

Parents will be able to don headsets to hear simultaneous translation of each speaker at the meeting to be held at La Colonia’s Frank Intermediate School, in the heart of Oxnard’s Latino community.

Bilingual circulars went home with schoolchildren last week, urging all parents to attend the meeting to help strengthen ties between school and home. The district also sent letters to every church in La Colonia asking them to inform parishioners about the meeting.

For tonight’s meeting, the district is also providing baby-sitting services and serving Mexican sweetbread as further enticement to get parents to attend.

“We need to get more parental involvement in the schools, and to do that we need to be more responsive to their needs,” said Oxnard School District trustee Arthur Lopez, who was elected in November. “It takes an entire community to raise a child--no one man, no one woman, no one teacher can raise a child. So we need to build a strong foundation to make this happen.”

*

With the Spanish-speaking participants wearing electronic headsets, organizers said they expect the 7 p.m. meeting in the school’s gym to look like a United Nations session.

“The headsets will certainly facilitate time because the English-speaking population will not have to hear the meeting in Spanish,” said trustee Mary Barreto.

Gildardo Villasenor, a coordinator with the county’s migrant education program, says he knows of no other local school district going to such extremes to reach Spanish-speaking parents.

“I’ve seen districts provide translators and try to get parents involved, but not to this extent,” Villasenor said. “This seems like a new concept to me. They are telling the community that they are willing to accommodate their needs.”

The board’s unanimous decision to hold some of its meetings at schools and to provide simultaneous translation came last December, weeks after Lopez won a seat on the board, shifting its makeup from majority white to majority Latino.

Prior to Lopez’s election, board meetings were characterized by heated arguments in which the two Latina trustees, Barreto and Susan Alvarez, often sided against the three white trustees, James Suter, Dorothie Sterling and former board member Jack T. Fowler.

According to Barreto, the problems stemmed from concerns that the Latino trustees were only concerned about Latino students.

“We’ve always been concerned about everybody’s needs, but we can’t deny that the majority of our students are Latinos, which makes their needs more noticeable,” Barreto said.

Trustee Sterling said she supports having simultaneous translation at district board meetings--as long as parents show up to take advantage of it.

“I hope people in the community respond to what is being offered because the more teamwork we have, the better the community and the children will be,” Sterling said.

About 80% of the elementary and intermediate school district’s 13,000 students are Latino, and 49% of those students speak English as a second language, district figures show.

The meeting is the first of several that the district plans to have at its 14 schools using a simultaneous translator. Meetings are usually held at district headquarters on A Street. Among the items on tonight’s agenda is discussion of a dress code for graduation ceremonies.

*

The district is spending up to $500 to provide the baby-sitting service, transport equipment from the district office to the school and provide translation services.

The district has also spent $2,250 to purchase the electronic, cordless headset equipment that will allow Spanish-speaking parents to hear the translation.

“We are going above and beyond what would be the normal procedure of a board meeting,” said Supt. Bernard Korenstein. “The business of the school district is something that the parents are interested in knowing and we want to help them to become involved.”