Parents With Class

When teachers in the open classrooms at Blanche Reynolds Elementary School take students on a field trip, there is rarely a need for a school bus. Instead, a steady reserve of parents is ready to tackle the job with minivans and four-doors.

Here, parent participation doesn’t just mean attending an occasional teacher-parent conference. “It’s not so easy,” Principal Nancy Barker said. “You don’t just sign up and say you’re here. You must follow the philosophy.”

That philosophy affects parents as well as their children. The midtown school is one of the few in the county that offers open classrooms. Its five open classes, which serve 120 children from kindergarten to sixth grade, allow children to learn at their own pace, so fourth-graders might be reading with sixth-graders but doing second-grade math.

But letting children set their own pace requires lots of helping hands. To provide that, parents must contribute at least three hours weekly per child.

The requirement makes sense in a society that constantly forecasts the death of family values, parents say.

“Other schools often discourage parents from coming, and then they scream, ‘What happened to the family?’ ” said Jennifer Martin, who has two children enrolled in open classes. Martin often puts in double her required six hours a week.

The idea of parent participation permeates the entire school, which is divided into three sections: special education, regular school and open classrooms.

Mothers and fathers in regular and special education can spend as much as eight hours a day volunteering. But in the open-classroom program, which has two K-2 classrooms, one for grades 1-3, one 3-5 and one 3-6--parent involvement is a requirement.

A mother or father who enrolls a child from kindergarten to sixth grade and then enrolls another in kindergarten could be looking at a 12-year commitment.

Yet far from being a problem, parents often cite the participation requirement as one of the major draws for the 18-year-old open class program.

“We have other schools that have multigrades, but the outstanding amount of parent participation is what sets the school apart,” said Arlene Miro, the district’s director of administrative services for K-12.

Schools such as Bedford Open School in Camarillo and Park View in Simi Valley offer similar programs, but parent participation is voluntary.

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Blanche Reynolds’ reputation has grown mainly through the parent grapevine. Before the school went to the state-required lottery system of picking students, the open classes had a waiting list of more than 100. Some parents came from as far as Ojai to enroll their child.

“Some people would say, ‘I just had this baby. This kid will be in kindergarten in five or six years, but I would like to enroll them now,’ ” said Cathi Nye, who heads the school’s admissions and enrollment committee. Last year, 51 students were on the lottery list and 15 more on the waiting list for 20 to 25 slots.

It’s not so difficult to find a dozen parents on various parts of the campus, gardening, teaching children Spanish or cooking, or playing in the sandbox with the kids.

Wendy Russell, who has three children attending open classes, recently put in time driving students on field trips and putting her artistic skills to use.

Sitting at a garden that parents built, Russell rests after preparing for a school fund-raiser.

“Did you see the paper tree?” she asks, pointing at a Halloween costume she made with chicken wire and paper tissue for the school’s annual Pumpkin Moon Faire. “I’m so proud of it.”

Teacher S. Krystal McCauley said parent participation makes an impact on the children.

“There’s a certain magic when it’s your parent that comes to spend time in the classrooms,” she said. “The students come alive and they feel grounded when their parents are here.”

Fifth-grader Ally Strimska appreciates the parental aid.

“It’s nice to have someone you know here, especially someone you know very well,” said Ally, whose mother helps out in the classroom and garden.

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Administrators and teachers have noticed that it is not just the children who benefit from the school, but the parents as well.

Sometimes parents who didn’t have a pleasant elementary school experience find it therapeutic, said Barker, the school’s principal. “One parent said, ‘I’m having to redo school through my kindergartener.’

“They’re getting a chance to relive an experience that wasn’t positive then, but is positive now.”

David DeSantis, who works as a landscaper, said he’s one of the many parents who balance school duties with their jobs. DeSantis helped build the Rainbow Bridge playground, a $100,000 project that parents and others built in five days last year.

“People often put a value on their time,” DeSantis said. “I don’t buy into that time-is-money thing. They can only pay us so much for the job. When you put in time that other people can enjoy--and hundreds of kids spend time on the Rainbow Bridge--that is priceless.”