Schools Get Creative With Parent Involvement

At Wilson Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Spanish-speaking mental health workers offer counseling to immigrant parents overwhelmed by cultural differences.

At Madison Elementary in Redondo Beach, teachers serve dinner to families and then watch and offer tips as parents help their children with homework.

In the last few years, school officials around Southern California and the rest of the state, who used to just throw up their hands in dismay when parents didn’t show their faces at school, are going to ever more creative--and expensive--lengths to get them into the classroom.

“Schools are no longer saying, ‘Oh, gee, we have back-to-school night, and our parents don’t come. They must not care,’ ” said Kris Powell, who oversees parent programs for Orange County’s Department of Education. “They are finding ways to get parents in there.”

Educators’ sudden interest in the home front has been fueled by a growing number of private grants, by a tidal wave of federal and state legislation encouraging districts to get parents involved and by an expanding body of research that suggests that getting Mom and Dad into the classroom raises tests scores.

The push includes both carrots--such as extra funding and awards programs--and sticks. Schools that cannot show that they have involved parents are no longer eligible for many grant programs or for the National Blue Ribbon Awards.

Maria Escobar has found the program at Wilson Elementary “a godsend.” The Families and Schools Together program, or FAST, is funded by a hodgepodge of private grants and state funds.

Escobar, who emigrated from Mexico 15 years ago, said she and her husband were struggling with the different practices of raising children in the United States.

Their 9-year-old son, Bryan, was spending too much time hanging out in the street and was refusing to do his homework. Intimidated by English-speaking school officials and not close to many of her neighbors, Escobar did not know where to turn.

In the 10-week FAST program, she and her husband learned to praise their son more and scold him less--”the American way,” she said.

“Now he is more disciplined himself,” she said. But what’s more, Escobar now knows 10 other Spanish-speaking mothers at Wilson whom she can turn to for support. Together, the women have begun volunteering to supervise during lunch at the school and feel comfortable talking to the principal and teachers.

Their newfound ease has rubbed off on their children, said another program participant, Maricela Vasquez. Since completing the program, Vasquez and her husband have made a point of working with their children on homework every night.

“My children are happier with me because I am participating in their school,” Vasquez said.

A few miles away, Karla Wells, principal of Lambert Elementary School in Santa Ana, cited the campus’ involved parents as a major reason for the school’s success. Lambert this year posted the highest gains of any school in Orange County on the state’s new Academic Performance Index.

When she arrived two years ago at the school, where most students are Latino, only a handful of parents were PTA members.

This year, there are 150. Hundreds more parents participated at the beginning of the year in seminars about the U.S. education system. And, with grants from the school and a private organization, parents have opened an off-campus center in a nearby apartment complex where children can go for help with homework.

It was successes at schools like Lambert that first made officials pay attention to the link between involved parents and successful students, said Carol Dickson, a consultant on parent involvement at the state Department of Education.

For much of the 1970s and ‘80s, administrators believed that socioeconomic levels were the single biggest factor in determining how well children did in school. But then educators began to look at schools in high poverty-areas that were succeeding and wondering what their secret was. The finding: “There was one thing that trumps socioeconomic factors, and that was parental involvement,” Dickson said.

More studies were done, and by the early 1990s, many education experts were convinced that getting parents into schools was the modern form of campus medicine.

Bringing about such a sea change in school officials’ attitudes, however, did not happen overnight, especially among busy educators trained to believe that it is teachers who know best about the education of their students. In addition, many traditional ways of getting parents involved in school, such as the PTA, did not work with immigrant parents, who were alienated by the formal rules.

The first major move for change came in 1989, when the State Board of Education adopted a policy calling for schools to get parents involved. Then, in 1992, a state task force laid out plans for how to do so.

Two years later, the federal government joined the game with the overhaul of the Title I program. From then on, schools receiving funds from the massive anti-poverty program had to show that they had involved parents.

In 1998, state legislators passed a parents bill of rights, giving parents the right to visit their children’s classrooms, talk to teachers and receive progress reports.

Also in 1998, Proposition 227 ended most bilingual education. Along with that came state funding to teach English to adults. Many districts used that money to start English classes for parents, which brought them into the schools.

Then there was the Academic Performance Index, which ranks all schools according to how well students do on standardized tests, and how much they improve from year to year. The rankings are published in newspapers and on the Internet, and school officials say they have sparked an outpouring of parent interest in the schools.

“Schools have realized that they have to get parents to buy in,” said Robert Barbot, superintendent of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, who has made getting parents involved one of the major priorities of his administration.

The API scores have given parents a concrete way to evaluate their children’s schools, he said, which has made them feel much more comfortable about asking principals and teachers for explanations of what is going on in the classroom.

All this was given an added push in 1999, when the Legislature authorized $15 million to copy a Sacramento Unified School District program statewide. The program, which began four years ago at the request of local religious leaders, pays teachers extra to go to the homes of students at lower-achieving schools, to help parents feel connected to school and understand how to help their children.

Legislators also set aside $5 million to train parents to be involved in school. Sixteen schools in Orange County and 146 in Los Angeles received grants. Among them are Madison Elementary in Redondo Beach and Washington Elementary in Santa Ana.

Six years ago, Washington began one of the state’s first comprehensive parent programs. Every morning, parents are encouraged to go to their children’s classrooms for the first half hour and read to them, said Principal Robert Anguiano.

The school also hosts family literacy nights, including workshops on poetry, opera, computer technology and how to get children into college. Last summer, the school began offering English classes for parents. Teachers also ask parents to read books to their children and write about the experience. Then the teachers write back to the parents.

“It’s had a tremendous effect on the school,” said campus parent coordinator Bertha Benavides. “We have hardly any discipline problems at school. Just opening the doors to the parents has enabled them to be aware of what’s going . . . and test scores have gone up.”