Volunteers Love 1st Assignment

Try to imagine a family with nine children and not a single toothbrush among them, let alone any toothpaste. You know right away this family needs help.

Fortunately, in this case, these children are getting a double dose of loving assistance. The county’s Court Appointed Special Advocates program (CASA) tries to get families that have been referred to them back on track. A well-trained volunteer advocate will try to build a good relationship with the children, then make a report to the court on what the system might do to improve their lives. This family of a mother and nine kids was lucky enough to get two special advocates. And what a pair they got.

Jim and Loretta Conrad of Garden Grove, parents of four grown children, were about to complete their CASA training in February when they were asked to take on this challenge as their first assignment. Jim Conrad has worked in the ship-building industry all his life. Loretta Conrad is a retired civil personnel director for the Navy. After getting over their surprise, they agreed to take on the family until permanent advocates could be found. They later asked to be the permanent advocates themselves.

Confidentiality prevents the Conrads from explaining to me how this family came to the court’s attention. It’s a Latino family, an unemployed mother with seven boys and two girls. The children range in age from 2 to 14. And all of them, Loretta Conrad says, “are just so beautiful you can’t believe it.”

The first meeting was a little overwhelming.

“They all wanted to talk at once,” Jim Conrad says now with a smile. “And they loved to bang each other up the side of the head all the time. It was quite a different experience for us.”

First the Conrads had to explain to the children they weren’t there to provide them money, but to spend time with them and perhaps help them in some ways. And this was a family in need of help: dental care, health care, clothing, education. The Conrads have tried to address all those needs, with the help of other agencies.

“The oldest boy had just stopped going to school,” Jim Conrad explains. “We finally got him into a different school, and his attendance has improved, at least a little.”

Sometimes it’s the system that’s at fault, the Conrads are convinced. They gave one example that had me gritting my teeth: The school one child attended ran out of textbooks for a class. So textbooks in English were passed out until they were gone. Then some Latino children without books were given textbooks in Spanish, including one from the Conrads’ Latino family. Problem was, the family the Conrads are helping only speaks English, not Spanish. How can this child get an education if the teachers follow such stereotypes, the Conrads wondered.

The couple have tried to think of creative ways to share time with the nine. They took them to a Kids Expo, to the library, on a ferry boat ride. The children had never ridden on a boat before. They took them all to Knott’s Berry Farm, with a picnic lunch.

“We gave each of them $5 and told them they could spend it any way they wanted,” Loretta Conrad says. When the day was over, the oldest boy had saved his entire amount. The money was simply too precious to him to spend.

The Conrads have already made two reports to the court, and have a third due. Their goal is to improve this family’s condition enough that the older children can help care for the younger ones, so the mother can get some type of education to help her gain employment. Right now she has no job skills.

Despite this family’s many obstacles to overcome, the Conrads are optimistic.

“We see so much potential,” says Jim Conrad. “These kids are so smart. They really are just a wonderful bunch.”

The Big Split: Let’s see a show of hands: How many of you who live in Fountain Valley would like to see your city split into two separate telephone area codes? How would any of you like to see Orange, Garden Grove, Stanton and Cypress split up that way?

These are among the final three proposals for providing Orange County with another area code. One of the plans is called “the overlay option.” If you got a new telephone line, you’d be area code 714, but people would have to dial 1, then 714, before dialing your number.

All these complications arise because Orange County is running out of available numbers for its 714 area code (which covers all in the county except Seal Beach and parts of La Habra and Los Alamitos). You can blame it on the increase in cellular telephones, pagers and faxes.

If you have suggestions on the best way to accommodate everybody, now is your chance. The major telecommunications companies are holding a public meeting on the new area code proposals at 7 tonight at the Mission Viejo city council chambers. There’s a similar meeting Wednesday night at the Fullerton city council chambers, and Thursday night at the Huntington Beach City Council chambers.

Driving in High Gear: There’s something else we’ve got a lot of in this county besides telephones: vehicles. The state Department of Motor Vehicles recently reported Orange County having more than 2 million cars, trucks, trailers and motorcycles. That’s second only to Los Angeles County’s 6 million plus. Nearly 40,000 of Orange County’s vehicles were motorcycles. The huge majority of them--76%--were cars.

Wrap-Up: Jim Conrad has one person to thank for his good fortune in finding this 10-member family: his wife Loretta. She’s one of those truly remarkable people. She started out a few years ago as a volunteer at UCI Medical Center, where she worked with children brought in as potential abuse cases. That led to her volunteering for the county’s Child Abuse Services Team (CAST). Her job was to spend time with children brought in to the Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange while officials met with the parents or filled out paperwork.

“I would just fall in love with all them,” she explains. “But I’d get to see them for such a short amount of time.”

She still spends one day a week with CAST. But she wanted to take the CASA training to delve deeper into children’s problems. And she asked her husband if he’d like to take the training with her.

“At first I was just curious,” he says. “But once you get into it, there are just so many children who need help. And the system fails them in so many ways.”

Right now there are 150 children in Orange County on a waiting list to be assigned to a court-appointed special advocate. Sadly, there just aren’t enough people like the Conrads to go around.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or sending a fax to (714) 966-7711.