Despite Aid, Boy Still Far Behind Peers

Teaching 9-year-old Ruben Rocha to read has been a frustrating affair, marked by excruciatingly slow progress and fights with teachers and tutors because he would not sit still, let alone concentrate on the page.

Ruben’s mother must care for a severely disabled baby and her six other boys in the family’s converted Boyle Heights garage. His father, Ernesto, who received only two years of schooling in Mexico, recently landed full-time work as a gardener. As for Ruben’s two teenage brothers, one struggles with bad grades, the other with gang life.

Since being profiled in a Times story eight months ago, Ruben and his family have been inundated with donations of children’s books and offers of volunteer help. He has made progress but remains far behind his classmates at Malabar Street Elementary School. His story underlines the benefits and the limits to what volunteerism can accomplish.

There’s no quick fix when it comes to bringing students who are behind up to the level of their peers.

Such students fall behind for a variety of reasons. Poverty, unstable home lives, learning or physical disabilities and poor nutrition can all play a role in classroom performance. Without books at home or direct intervention, students may not have learned their letters, their sounds or how to put those sounds together to make words.

Ruben was teamed up with tutors and role models, given several shelves’ worth of books and kept after school for hours on end. His academic progress over the last eight months, however, has been measured by the fact that he can now recognize simple words and then weave those words into simple sentences.

His experience illustrates how thousands of impoverished children in similar circumstances need experts--and a long-term commitment--to overcome such problems.

Getting Ruben’s parents involved in his learning has been a daunting challenge. That has left the job of helping Ruben study primarily to his third-grade teacher, Leonor Alvarez, and James Marin, a 20-year-old volunteer tutor.

Self-Defeating Attitudes Cited

Second-grade teacher Francisca Gamez has also played a role. She taught Ruben in a new after-school, remedial reading program she started with a $2,500 grant.

Ruben “had self-defeating attitudes,” Gamez said. “No wonder. His siblings teased him, saying, ‘Why try, Ruben? You’re dumb.’ ”

“Half the time he didn’t even attend [the 16-week course],” she said. “When he did, he had his head on the desk grumbling, ‘I can’t read.’

“Wouldn’t it be great if learning was the only problem we had to address with these kids, and not nutrition, hygiene, transportation, parenting, self-esteem, poverty and crime?” she said. “The lesson here is this: Unless we educate the parents to sit down and give their children meaning and purpose in life, nothing will change.”

Gamez added: “Is Ruben salvageable? I hope so.”

In the five-year span ending in 1996, the number of children living in poverty in Los Angeles County doubled to 651,000. They make up 33% of all school-age children in the county, education officials said. Studies have consistently shown that as poverty rises, test scores decline.

Ruben is among 955 students at Malabar, which is at the eastern edge of one of the most densely populated and economically disadvantaged areas in the state. About 86% of the school’s third-graders scored far below average on last year’s Stanford 9 standardized test.

Ruben had been receiving intense help with his homework and reading assignments from Marin, a UCLA political science student who came to take a deep interest in the boy and his family. But in April, Marin threw up his hands in defeat after losing too many battles with the boy’s apathetic parents and the family television.

He told Ruben’s parents to enroll in “parenting classes”; they said he was meddling. He complained that Ruben needed time set aside to rest and study, and they blamed the boy’s problems on the school and his previous teachers. He pleaded with the older Rocha boys to turn off the television, but they seemed addicted to wrestling programs.

When the volunteer office of the Los Angeles Unified School District delivered a basket of books to Ruben’s house, Marin helped the family unpack the gifts. They were later stowed in a corner behind the couch, out of sight and hard to reach.

Last week, however, Marin returned to take Ruben to the nearby Malabar Street Library. There, he cracked open a basic first-grade reader and said, “Read to me, Ruben.”

Without hesitation, the boy hunched over the tattered copy of “The Witch Grows Up” and began to read, slowly but clearly: “The lady who lives next door is a witch. She is our friend.”

A smile and a touch of excitement crossed Marin’s face as he quickly followed up with a question: “If a word ends in the letters ‘ing,’ what is that?”

“Suffix!” Ruben shouted.

“Wow! You’ve improved a lot, Ruben,” Marin said. “Good job! Eight months ago, you could barely recite the alphabet in English or Spanish.”

But later, Marin brooded over the extraordinary effort it took to get Ruben that far.

“I was naive. I thought I would work hard with him for a few months and he’d be back on track,” Marin said. “Truth is, for the amount of work we’ve poured into Ruben and his family, we expected more results.

“Was it worth it?” he added rhetorically. “I have to say yes. He now rivals his older brothers as one of the best readers in his family. And he taught me a lot too. He taught me not to give up, and that education takes a lifetime.”

Marin’s enthusiasm caps eight months of growth for the shy little boy with a drooping left eyelid. On Friday, Ruben graduated from third grade.

Standing over the boy as he studied the words in a Dr. Seuss book, teacher Alvarez said: “He’s not reading at the level I want, he needs more support at home, and he needs praise like medicine; it’s a must. But, my God, he’s making wonderful progress.

“And just look at this,” she said, holding up a wrinkled sample of Ruben’s homework. “He’s writing simple sentences, for heaven’s sake. It’s not a lot. But it’s a lot more than he could do only months ago.”

On the back of a crayon drawing of a pumpkin in a field, Ruben had written: “If I was the boy, I eat the pumpkin because is good.”

Eating fried chicken and cheese puffs sprinkled with chili during a classroom end-of-school party, Ruben said: “I felt bad when I didn’t know how to read.

“My favorite book is Dr. Seuss’ ‘Cat in the Hat,’ ” he said. “Now I look at the pictures, and the words. The pictures help me know the words.

“I’ve read a few of the books that people gave me,” he added. “I read them to my mom and dad. They liked that.”

Special Education Placement Urged

Based on a psychological assessment to identify learning disabilities, Ruben’s principal and some of his earlier teachers say he should be placed in special education. But Alvarez is convinced that Ruben, though slower than other students, responds to attention and, in time, can achieve standards for his age.

“People have put it in his mind that he can’t do it,” she said. “He was so used to being a failure it didn’t make a difference for him to try. But his progress tells us that there is something up there to work with.”

The fact that Alvarez, Marin and others have sternly urged Ruben’s parents to become more involved in their children’s education remains a sticking point. Marin even suggested that they unplug their television and radios.

But no sooner had Ruben’s father found work as a gardener than he started making payments on a 72-inch television that takes up much of the space in the family’s tiny living room.

“People have told us to throw out our television and radio, even told my husband to stop drinking; that hurts,” Guadalupe Rocha said, trying not to cry.

“Those people should live in this garage and be the mother of my children. Then they would understand what we go through here,” she said. “I’m starting to get angry about all the criticism because it is entering into my private life. If people want to help, help little Ruben, not us.”

She also railed against Malabar Principal Lourdes Vargas for urging Ruben to transfer into special education classes. “Children don’t progress in special education,” she said, “I know; I have two sons in it now.”

Joan Suter, director of the volunteer office of the Los Angeles Unified School District, believes that “Ruben represents thousands of kids coming from homes that are on overload. We have to look at the problem through their windows, not by our own standards.

“Let’s not get depressed about the Rubens of this city, or their home environments,” she added. “Do we not educate these children because their parents are poor and illiterate? Of course not. We must do all we can for them.”

Marin agrees. But then, few people have devoted as much free time and attention to Ruben as he has. For six months, Marin worked with the boy each Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. He took him to the library, the park, out to eat and to his home. Marin gave him a book bag, pencils, folders and endless lectures on the importance of going to school.

He even crafted a “parenting program” for the Rocha family, and helped them get on the waiting list for Section 8 federal housing.

“On some days Ruben cried because he believed he couldn’t do his homework; on other days he shouted with joy because he could,” Marin said. “There were days when his parents were happy with the progress, others when they would tell me, ‘Our kids don’t like school. They don’t like to learn. Leave them alone!’

“One day, I said, ‘If that’s the way you feel, fine,’ and I walked away,” he said. “But there is always hope. So I came back. Sometimes, it’s just hard to pull hope out of people.”

Alvarez, who has been reassigned to teach fourth- and fifth-grade children with limited English skills next semester, said she wants another opportunity to do just that with Ruben.

“His mother and I are talking about seeing if we can have Ruben join my fourth-grade class,” she said. “For some strange reason, I can reach him.”