An Immigrant Family’s Vexing Lesson in Red Tape

One day in August a man followed Maria de Lourdes Rivera as she walked home from school.

She did not accept a ride in his shiny green car, and she did not fall for his other tricks. The ninth-grader escaped, fearful but unharmed.

What she could not escape was the ordeal that followed.

Maria was afraid to return to Belmont High School. But to enroll in a new school she needed transfer papers. Each time the girl’s mother, Otilia Gonzalez, called the school in the weeks that followed, she heard an earful of promises about when the papers would be ready, she said. Each time, she was left empty-handed.

So for five months Maria de Lourdes did not attend school.

What should have been a simple transfer has instead become Maria’s first hard lesson in American education. The semester she has lost is a telling illustration of what can happen to families in Los Angeles schools when bureaucrats fail to carry out district policies. Children of parents untutored in advocacy--especially those new to the country--may lose out, even if their families place a high value on education.

“My mother, my father were very poor,” said Gonzalez, 48, who immigrated here from Irapuato in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. “We never had school. . . . Here in this country there’s a good opportunity to study, to achieve.”

The challenge families face is acquiring the skills it takes to make sure the system does not fail their children. For any family, it can be a tough task.

In 1998, when Maria arrived, she studied at Bellagio Newcomers School, a campus designed to ease the transition of students new to this country. There she made friends and learned to love computers.

But by last August, Maria was enrolled in the ninth grade at Belmont, a large, overcrowded year-round campus just west of downtown. She said the person who followed her home from school that day was someone she had seen on campus, an older man, maybe in his 30s. “I saw him at the school, but he never said anything to me,” Maria said.

That day, he tried hard to get her into his car and to find out her address, she said. Her mother reported the incident to school police, and Maria later looked through photos of school employees in hopes of helping police find the man. A Belmont counselor told the mother and daughter that Maria could transfer to Los Angeles High School, Gonzalez said.

Here is where district policy and the reality of life at city schools collided.

The policy requires that the transfer process be completed within three days, said Hector Madrigal, director of pupil services for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“We feel very strongly that students that are being transferred need to be assisted and supported throughout the process so that we can guarantee that they do not become school dropouts and that they would not lose instruction time needlessly,” he said. “It’s the responsibility of the sending school to make arrangements for an appropriate receiving school, and it’s the responsibility of the sending school to verify that the student actually enrolled at the receiving school.”

Ignacio Garcia, principal of Belmont, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

But the school never sent the papers, Gonzalez said. She said she called Belmont at least eight times and was told on several occasions that the papers would be mailed. She was also told that officials were still searching for space at the new school, she said.

“Later, we’ll send them later,” Gonzalez recalled being told. “The paper never arrived. . . . I asked, ‘What is happening? The girl is here without classes.’ If it were a problem with me, they would send the police here to take her to class.”

In the meantime, Maria spent her days in the house without the benefit of books; a woman from Belmont visited the family to pick up her schoolbooks. Her only education came from tutoring her 12-year-old brother in math and English.

Gonzalez did not know what else to do.

The mother of nine grew up on a ranch in Mexico and never attended school. Although she can read some, she cannot write. In Mexico, she worked in factories--and for a while in a greenhouse where she earned about $10 a week.

Those meager wages drove her to California. She first came alone. After working a stint as a nanny for a family in Sylmar, she returned to Mexico. But a year and a half ago, she came back to Los Angeles with three of her younger children.

On the streets near her home she sells tamales and a milk and rice drink. What she earns supports the family. They live in a very small apartment in a well-worn building. They do not have a phone or own a car. They do not speak English. They have no other family here.

When her daughter’s problem arose, Gonzalez did not call downtown to the school district’s headquarters, or to the cluster leader for the area that includes Belmont, or to her school board representative.

“I didn’t know anything about that,” she said. “You know how things are done in your own country, but when you come here, no.”

In the United States, she said, she keeps mostly to herself. She sells her wares on the streets, then returns home. Rarely does she go out otherwise. And she tries to keep her children close. No baggy pants for her son. No long hair. No shaved head. The children go out together and stay close to home. She doesn’t want problems, she said.

Maria’s fate was turned around by a reporter from the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, who wrote about her problems. After a front-page story ran last week, Gonzalez and Maria were told the problem had been solved. At the end of the week, the papers arrived.

But so did questions from school officials. She said they asked her: Why did you speak to the reporter? Why not? she responded.

Gonzalez said the principal told her he was not informed of Maria’s situation and it was all a misunderstanding. Part of the problem, he told her, was the family’s inability to speak English, Gonzalez recalled.

Madrigal, the director of pupil services, could not comment on exactly what happened. But he said, “The principal is ultimately responsible to ensure those policies are followed and implemented. There’s no excuse for any sending school, no matter how overcrowded or lacking in students, . . . to take actions that would cause students to be out for months.”

After the papers arrived, Gonzalez faced another problem. She had to wait until a friend of her daughter’s arrived to help her fill out the forms. Then, she said, they would take them to Maria’s new school.