Reading Readiness

Alma Flores always wanted to go to school but never had the chance.

Her father drank. She had assumed her mother’s duties by the age of 10, including slaughtering animals on their small farm in Durango, Mexico, and carrying well water for coins.

Achieving a dream, the 51-year-old mother of six will graduate today from a family literacy program based at Maclay Middle School.

Her halting English is less expressive than her joyful tears, but she says she has just begun her education. She and her son now read the newspaper together every night. She copies books into her notebook. She turns to a handwritten copy of the Pledge of Allegiance, which she recites--reads, rather--in English and Spanish.

“Parents are their children’s first and most important teachers,” said Ardis Flenniken, a Cal State Northridge staff member who directs the program, which is designed to help parents become more engaged with their children’s education.

The three-month, thrice-weekly classes were jointly funded by the Joseph Drown and Prudential foundations. Twenty-five women participated in the class, which covered everything from how to discipline children to how to apply for a library card.

“Even everyday acts can be shared literacy activities, like shopping or writing letters to relatives,” Flenniken said. “The main emphasis of the English classes is their children’s performance in school and the parent’s job readiness.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District has recently instituted a family literacy program as part of Project GRAD, a new school initiative in the northeast San Fernando Valley. Flenniken is coordinating two other family literacy programs--one is a night class, the other is being held at Montague Charter Academy, near Maclay Middle School.

The Maclay classes have given many of the parents--mostly poor, Latina mothers--their first glimpse of student life.

A soft-spoken woman with long, gray-streaked hair, Maria Robedo learned how to write her name in the class. She has lived in the United States for 18 years, but spent much of that time in isolation, rearing her children and grandchildren. The language barrier, coupled with her age, deepened her loneliness, she said.

But at age 74, she’s intent on taking more classes, learning English and perhaps going to college.

“I feel emotionally like a child who wants to learn,” she said through an interpreter. Growing up in rural Mexico, Robedo didn’t even know what school was. She recalled her first and only writing exercise when she was 7.

“When I was little I was helping grind cornmeal,” she said. “My father and I spread it out on the stone and began to make lines in powder.

“This is how you write, ‘mama,’ ” she recalled her father saying. Robedo was still a young girl when her mother died.

Now she wants to help her grandchildren with their homework.

Petra Suarez, 48, wants to know what her 11 children are talking about, since they speak better English than Spanish.

“Now that I’m coming to school, I can understand them and interrupt them,” she said. She also wants to find a job and eventually open a restaurant.