REGION : Children Return to Azteca School Sites

Parents whose children attend Azteca Head Start schools continue to protest a decision by the agency’s board of directors to disband the program and close its 13 sites in June, but they have returned their children to school after holding them out for one week.

The board of directors made the decision in February, and several parents and teachers said they have not been given a reason.

Azteca board chairwoman Gloria Lopez said the board’s decision to disband the agency came after more than a year of wrangling with the 15-member Parent Council. Under federal guidelines, any actions taken by the board such as the hiring or firing of personnel and purchasing agreements must be ratified by the parents.

“This last year, with our inability to work with the Parent Council and operate the agency efficiently and effectively, we decided to close,” Lopez said. “We did get to an impasse (with the parents). We tried to reconnect the communication line and it did not happen.”

Veronica Narvaez, who lives in East Los Angeles and takes her 4-year-old son, Andres, to the Azteca Head Start in Maywood, said parents have lost hope of reviving the programs they depend on to educate their preschool children. Azteca’s 13 schools in East Los Angeles, Alhambra, Montebello, Maywood and Cudahy are scheduled to close June 30.

Narvaez said the news was upsetting. “The parents gave up. Their hopes were just taken away from them,” she said.

Lopez suggested that the problems arose from personality conflicts between the board and parents and that the parents did not represent the concerns of the majority of parents involved in Head Start.

Narvaez and other parents took their children out of school in protest during the last week of March, but the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which administers federal funds for Head Start programs, had threatened to shut down sites with low attendance even earlier than the June 30 closure date. Funding for schools is based on average daily attendance figures, so mass absences would have resulted in a crucial loss of funding.

For two weeks, parents and teachers have been picketing the Azteca offices in Alhambra, as well as the county’s offices in Downey.

They fear that closing the sites will make Head Start less accessible to their families because the neighborhood sites they are familiar with will be closed.

Head Start is a federally funded educational program for low-income preschool children. The county contracts with 38 public and private agencies to run Head Starts.

The county plans to place all 690 students at Head Start sites at or near current sites operated by Azteca and has offered to help teachers and staff find jobs in other Head Start agencies in the county, said Los Angeles County Office of Education spokesman Steve Horowitz.

“That is the key from our perspective, that services will continue for those children for next year,” Horowitz said.

Most of Azteca’s students will be served by existing agencies, such as the ABC Child Development Center, which will take on 256 of Azteca’s students. The Foundation for Early Childhood Education Centers will take on 74 students and the Montebello Unified School District will provide Head Start services for another 160 students.

The county will set up its own Head Start sites for the remaining 200 students in Maywood, Bell and Cudahy in order for them to start school in September. The county made this decision because the process of setting up another agency to serve those areas would take up to a year, Horowitz said.

Parents in these areas will also have the option of enrolling in the county’s new “home-based” program in which trained teachers visit the home for 1- 1/2 hours a week to train parents to be the child’s instructor. Students will automatically be assigned to a Head Start site unless they request the home-based program, Horowitz added.

Teachers have been assured by the county that they will be offered help in finding new jobs, but few believe there will be enough job openings in the replacement sites for everyone, said teacher Adrina Lopez.

Azteca has had a succession of problems in recent years, including losing a lawsuit brought by parents of disabled children who were refused entrance or enrollment in the schools. In 1990, Azteca was ordered to return $76,000 in mismanaged funds, including money used for unauthorized air fares and checks made out to cash.

In 1993, the county stripped the agency of $2 million in federal funds because of financial and other problems. Teachers claimed that wages had been withheld by Azteca and their job descriptions had been changed by Azteca without consultation with their union.

The agency has had five directors in five years.