Agency Makes Literacy a Family Project

The festive, hand-lettered sign on the preschool wall says it all -- in two languages.

“Tu significas mucho para mi! You mean a lot to me!”

It’s a message that most of the 65 or so young children who gather daily at Oxnard’s El Centrito de la Colonia can’t read -- yet.

But for the kids and their parents, the caring comes through loud and clear in the programs at El Centrito, an 11-year-old agency founded in the low-income La Colonia neighborhood by social workers Jesus and Luann Rocha.

“My husband is from the Colonia, and we could see it was ripe for a community center,” said Luann Rocha.

“We have a strong belief in working with neighborhood centers instead of large bureaucratic structures.”

This year, El Centrito’s school readiness and early literacy program received a grant of $15,000 from the Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign, which raises money for nonprofit agencies in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

Designed for recent immigrants, the program is a family affair. For a while each day, parents -- mainly mothers -- and their children hunch together over coloring books and in singing circles.

Then the adults troop to an upstairs room in the old Oxnard High School for intensive English instruction while their children cluster around classroom computers for English lessons of their own.

“Children rise to any standard you put in front of them,” said Luann Rocha, proudly pointing to graduates of the program who started with no English and went on to stand out a few years later in classes for gifted students. “We give them all the concepts they need to be ready to start reading -- it levels the playing ground.”

That’s good news for mothers such as Martha Carrillo, whose daughters Wendy and Miriam attend El Centrito.

“They get excited,” she said. “When they like some learning materials at school, they ask if they can do the same things at home.”

Children are encouraged even more when they see their parents learning English as well.

“The idea is to create family literacy,” said Barbara Price, a retired Los Angeles school psychologist who directs the program. “It can be a challenge-and-a-half.”

The program is meant for the working poor -- families that wouldn’t be covered by Head Start but who often couldn’t afford private preschools.

Many of the fathers toil in fields and packinghouses while their wives work at night, getting up early to prepare their older children for school before hauling themselves and their younger ones to El Centrito. Although some of the parents were professionals in Mexico, others had little education.

“We do a lot of work with parents on how to read to their children,” Luann Rocha said. “Even if they’re not literate, we ask them to pick up a book every day and look at the pictures together. We get them to enjoy the whole process of learning.”

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How to Give

The annual Holiday Campaign is part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which this year will match the first $800,000 raised at 50 cents on the dollar. Donations (checks or money orders) supporting the Holiday Campaign should be sent to: L.A. Times Holiday Campaign, File 56986, Los Angeles, CA 90074-6986. Do not send cash. Credit card donations can be made on the Web site: www.latimes.com/holiday campaign.

All donations are tax-deductible. Contributions of $50 or more may be published in The Times unless a donor requests otherwise; acknowledgment cannot be guaranteed. For more information call (800) LATIMES, Ext. 75771.