THEY’RE MAJOR MOMS : Friends, Mom ‘Brought Me Up, Gave Me Strength; They’re My Backbone’

MURIEL BRAGG, the mother of five children, is full-time director of the Hyde Park Family Service Center, which operates out of a cluster of bungalows on the campus of Hyde Park Elementary. Since August, 1994, the center has offered a variety of social, mental health, family and other services in conjunction with public and private agencies. Bragg was interviewed by community correspondent Erin J. Aubry.

*

I’ve been involved with Hyde Park ever since my oldest son, who was in special education, came here from 99th Street Elementary. My daughter is 9 and has been here ever since the first grade. I felt there wasn’t enough parent participation. The center tries to find different ways to involve the parents and make them want to come to the school and improve education for their children.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, at 105th and Central Avenue. Now I live on 10th Avenue, right down the street from the school. I have four children and one stepdaughter--five hearts in all.

I initially wanted to be an accountant, but when I got involved in schools I started getting more interested in working with kids. First I started volunteering my services, then I worked as a teacher’s assistant at 99th Street.

I don’t really have any ambition to be teacher or administrator; I really enjoy what I do. But I really want to get the center to the point where it can run itself. We’re trying to attract even more services that will better our community. We’re asking folks to support us, come see us. We have some computers now and are looking for instructors so we can open a training center.

The Family Service Center is not run by me alone, it’s run by parents and teachers who volunteer. The parents got together and decided they needed services close to the school; they were getting on the bus and going too far out. This space better serves our community. The parents all said, “How can we better ourselves, how can we better our children’s environment? And how can we make ourselves better parents?”

The first thing I thought was that a lot of parents needed ESL (English as a Second Language) classes so they could communicate better. And I don’t speak Spanish, so I needed to get into a class to learn to speak it, so we offer that, too. We have 40 or 50 people in the ESL class and a teacher from Crenshaw/Dorsey adult school. We’re also starting a citizenship class next week. The ethnic breakdown here is 50% African American, 50% Latino. We want to work with other schools in the community--junior high and high schools--so we can serve all the schools in the Crenshaw cluster.

I’m a single parent. There are a lot of single parents now who are living on one income andhave to work. They have to come home and try and deal with a family. What we try to do here is re-create that extended family, that community family, that used to exist.

Times have changed. It used to be when you acted up, you got a swat at school, then you went home and got it from aunty and Mama and Daddy. Corporal punishment is not allowed anymore, and neither is hugging because of the possibility of child abuse. But kids need hugging and attention, because sometimes parents are tired and don’t have the time.

My own encouragement team has been my friends Julia B. Williams, Mattye Fegan and my mother, Lula Bragg. She died several years ago, which was very hard on me because she was always there to support me and my family. They all brought me up, gave me strength; they’re my backbone.