On the Lookout for Mentors

Anna Flores teaches more than Spanish at Garfield High School.

She talks about growing up in a single-parent home in East L.A. She shows pictures of herself when she graduated from Garfield in 1987. She discusses the rigors of academic study at Cal State L.A.

The students seem to respond positively to her.

“We like to hear these things,” said 10th-grader Ramon Cellestino. “It’s pretty hard because we live around gangs, families with money problems. You get used to seeing these things. It’s hard to get past it [and] find someone who is sensitive to your problems, someone to look up to.”

“They turn to me because I understand them,” Flores said. “I come from a single-parent low-income home. I have had to struggle in much the same way they are right now.”

Unfortunately, education officials say, there are not enough teachers like Flores who can be both instructors and Latino role models.

In California, Latinos represent about 39% of public school enrollment while Latinos constitute about 10% of the teaching force.

A teacher recruitment project was launched this week in California and Texas, states with the highest concentration of Latino students, to address these statistics.

The campaign features 10 television spots, 30 seconds each, in English and Spanish.

Flores, about 30 students and faculty from Garfield and Bell high schools, and KMEX-TV anchor Nancy Agosto are featured in classroom scenes in the public service announcements.

The project was prompted by a 1991 study conducted at the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a national center for policy studies, which identified a severe shortage of Latino teachers nationwide. Less than 4% of the nation’s teachers are Latino, the study said.

“The minority teacher force is moving at a turtle’s pace since the 1991 report,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Claremont-based institute.

“There are different programs geared toward recruiting Latino teachers at colleges throughout the country,” said Morgan Appel, a senior research associate at the Rivera institute. “But in terms of reaching people directly through the television, the [ads] are the first project of its kind.”

The TV ads were shot at Garfied High by Carmona Productions, a Montebello-based company, and students from the Chicano Broadcast Students Club at Cal State L.A. Edward James Olmos, who played a Garfield teacher in the movie “Stand and Deliver,” helped narrate some of the announcements.

The campaign, called “Latino Teachers for Tomorrow’s Classrooms,” gives a toll-free number for people to get information about a career in teaching. The project is funded by grants from local and national foundations.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, comprised of 774 schools, the disparity between Latino students and teachers is striking.

Latino students constitute about 67% of the population, while 18% of the teachers are Latino.

“What’s occurring here is that the demographics for Latino students is dramatically changing, yet the teacher core isn’t,” Pachon said.

The need for Latino teachers goes beyond numeric representation, Rivera institute researchers say. Studies indicate that Latino students perform significantly better with the instruction of Latino teachers. When Latino teachers lead predominantly Latino classrooms, the researchers say, dropout rates decrease and students more frequently are recognized as gifted.

The parents of Latino teachers usually “went through some of the same problems that our parents go through . . . money problems, putting food on the table, finding a job,” said Nancy Ramirez, a 10th-grader at Bell High School. “That’s not to say that a [non-Latino] teacher can’t do a good job. I just think sometimes a Latino teacher is more sensitive to our problems. They motivate us.”

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“I think the commercials are a good idea because you get to see Latinos in them,” said Hugo Martinez, a senior at Bell High. “It’s rare that you see Latinos as role models on TV.”

The public service announcements target three markets: high school and college students, “career changers,” or college graduates in a transitional period, and parents of prospective Latino students.

“Most of us are the first in our family to go to college,” said Victoria Castro, a Los Angeles Unified School Board member, at a news conference discussing the program. “There is a sensitivity that Latino teachers bring with them as teachers and as role models.”

The ad campaign, Appel said, is “an excellent beginning, but we still have miles to go. The next step is to study the [nationwide] education programs that attract Latino teachers. It’s important that we see their faces in the larger face of America.”