Keeping Parents One Up

Hong Tran wants to know what to do about her daughter. The girl does her homework with the television blasting, and a telephone seems permanently attached to her ear, even when she’s supposed to be working on the computer.

“I am the rock in the house,” the Westminster mother said, “and she wants to see how far she can push me.”

To learn how to avoid getting pushed any further, Tran, 47, went back to school Saturday, to Parents’ Academy at the Westminster School District.

The daylong annual event teaches parents how to help their children; covering issues from discipline to reading to healthy living. About 150 parents gathered at Neomia B. Willmore Elementary School Saturday morning to attend workshops.

They listened to speakers discuss bullying, how to get kids ready for college and ways to motivate them.

Some of the workshops were in Spanish, others in Vietnamese, and many in English, with parents listening to translations over headphones.

Event coordinators said the workshops have become an indispensable means of reaching parents in this increasingly diverse city. The student body is 32% Asian, 36% Latino and 26% white.

“If we don’t address language barriers, we won’t have parent involvement,” said Adriean Tuzzolino, chairwoman of the Westminster Community Collaborative, which sponsored the event.

The collaborative is a network of local agencies, including the school district, faith-based groups and family centers.

To entice parents to come, organizers offered day care for about 40 youngsters, and 90 older children were sent to a Boys and Girls Club next door where they played games and tackled many of the same issues their parents were learning in the Parents’ Academy.

It was a new experience for Antonio Saucedo, 43, and his wife Maria, 25, who immigrated from Michoacan, Mexico, eight years ago. They have two children in the district.

“When I was going to school in Mexico,” Antonio Saucedo said in Spanish, “there was nothing like this. I learned a lot today.”

So did Tran, the Vietnamese mother.

She attended a workshop on discipline for teenagers given by Sue Nettleton, a community day school teacher who handles some of the most difficult students in the district.

“It’s OK to give reasons for your decisions, but not to negotiate them,” Nettleton told about a dozen parents in her workshop. The children have to know, “I am not here to be your friend, I’m here to be your mother.”

At the same time, Nettleton warned, “Don’t treat them like children, because they will do everything to prove they are not children; they are developing adults ... If you don’t show respect, don’t expect to get any respect back.”

Those words, translated into Vietnamese, registered with Tran.

Her 12-year-old daughter, a seventh-grader at Dr. Russell I. Johnson Middle School, doesn’t always come straight home from school, she said.

So the mother turns to threats in the heat of the moment.

Now, Tran said. “I’ll control my anger.”