Protests Close Tutoring Center

A tutoring center for more than 200 children in a troubled low-income Costa Mesa neighborhood has been shuttered indefinitely after parents protested the firing of one of its founding volunteers.

The Shalimar Learning Center, located in three rented apartments on Shalimar Street, has remained locked since last week, center officials said Tuesday.

Longtime neighborhood activist Maria Alvarez, 60, was let go last week because of years of work-related problems, said Randy Barth, founder of the center’s management organization, Teaching Helping Inspiring Kids Together, or THINK Together.

In a separate action, the building’s landlord has given Alvarez 30 days to move from the building, where she has lived for 24 years.

“She was simply a part-time employee, and she was a bad one at that,” Barth said. “We bent over backward for years with Maria, and it was just time to let her go.”

Barth said Alvarez failed to follow the structured learning schedule, spoke Spanish to children who were being tutored in English, and left the premises when she was supposed to be working.

But Alvarez defended her work and said the leaders of the center had grown distant from the community.

Last week, a group of about 30 parents chanted and held signs protesting her dismissal. They demanded that Alvarez be rehired or they wouldn’t send their children back to the center. Barth and center officials say the protest was so heated that they decided to close the center out of concern for employee safety until they could meet with parents to discuss the situation.

But Alvarez was heartened by the community support.

“It was like a present from God,” she said. “For the children, I feel very sad.”

A single mother of four grown children, Alvarez helped establish the center in 1994 at her two-story apartment building with Barth, a leader at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach.

With help from St. Joachim Church in Costa Mesa and Women of Vision, a support group for women and children, the center began tutoring hundreds of elementary and high school students in a single three-bedroom apartment. Eventually, they opened a teen center and computer lab.

Alvarez said she noticed a change about a year ago when THINK Together took over the center’s management and funding. She said the handful of new staff members wouldn’t talk to the parents or work with the children.

“The community doesn’t like THINK Together or any of [their staff],” she said. “For more than six years, I was the liaison to the community because they won’t listen.”

But Barth said more than five co-directors have quit the center because they didn’t like working with Alvarez. He said his organization has successfully opened five other similar tutoring centers in distressed neighborhoods in Santa Ana, Tustin and Orange.

Barth said he isn’t planning to close the Shalimar center unless the community wants that. A meeting with parents has been scheduled to discuss the center’s future at 7 p.m. Thursday at St. Joachim Church, 1964 Orange Ave.

“We think they like the center and what it does for their children,” Barth said. “I think it’s only a handful of parents that don’t.”

Neil Malkus, department chairman for Newport Harbor High School’s English Language Development program, said a number of his students will be affected if the center closes.

“I’ll be very upset; it’s a resource for them,” Malkus said. “There’s computers and encyclopedias there to help them with their work. Some of these children don’t have book one in their home.”

Costa Mesa City Councilman Joe Erickson, who served as the city’s mayor from 1994 to 1996, said Alvarez had a huge effect on the neighborhood’s rebirth from a gang-infested area to a safer community for children.

“She emerged as a leader when the neighborhood needed someone,” Erickson said. “She’s very dedicated to young people, and I think her heart has always been in the right place.”

Open-air drug sales, prostitution and drive-by shootings were commonplace in the area several years ago, Erickson said. The city sealed off most the streets into the neighborhood and supported the creation of an academic refuge for children. He credited Barth’s leadership and funding for the center’s success.

Barth said if the center stays in Shalimar, he wants to expand into another apartment or rent a building close to the schools. If the center is no longer wanted in the community, he said, there are several other neighborhoods that have asked for help.

“We just don’t want the kids in Shalimar to miss out,” Barth said.