Conversation : ‘We Have Teachers Who Haven’t Bought Into the Community’

As a teacher and an elected official, I get to see the issues on both sides. I strongly feel we’ve lost a sense of community in the school. The people, the governmental structures, social agencies, seem to be working in a vacuum. What we need to do is to create alliances of community groups that meet the needs of the whole child.

Without even counting the dollars we spend on our standard recreation program, the city of Rosemead spends about $300,000 a year on special programs for kids. We have in-school counseling programs and an in-class anti-gang curriculum. There’s been a decrease in gang activity, definitely. When a spate of Asian gang violence began three years ago, we were able to roll right into those special programs so we could deal with it head on.

One of the problems I see is that we have teachers who haven’t bought into the community. They’re here to do a job, they leave to go home to their own communities.

Let’s make sure that the kids understand that the school is theirs. They have proprietorship. I’m a hardcore believer in service learning. The kids need to be responsible for school work, but also for behavior, the looks of the school.

We can no longer find excuses for low test scores. Yes, we have non-English speaking students. You always have those kids who in two years you know will be totally bilingual. Then there are other kids whose mothers and fathers have eliminated themselves from the picture. They never become fully bilingual. I’m in favor of bilingual education, but we cannot use that as an excuse for lowering expectations.

We as educators tend, by the third or fourth grade, to look at the kids who don’t do their assignments, who have never had the support of their parents, and say, “We’re not going to get much out of them.” If we excuse that child from doing what the rest of the class is doing, we are saying that, because the parents aren’t helping us, we don’t have any responsibility.

I send a letter home at the beginning of the year that must be signed by the parent saying all assignments are due on the day they are assigned. If they are not done, the child may have to finish them at recess time, at lunch or after school. My sixth graders hate it. The parents sometimes complain. But when you look at my state tests and compare them with the fifth grade scores, I can show you the kids who did all the work and gained two or three grade levels. I’ve had to back off when parents complained and the kids gained nothing.

We need to teach kids how to work together. In each group, two or three kids are going to take over and one kid will let the others do the work for them. You can’t let that happen. Every member of the group is responsible. To a lesser degree, the kids who become the leaders and listen to nobody else don’t make much of themselves because they can’t agree with anybody else. Those kids who let everyone else do the work become the welfare cases of the future.