Free Program Teaches Children -- and Their Parents

It is a familiar morning scene in many neighborhoods: parents with children in tow waiting for the school bus. Except it is evening and this school bus picks up the parents, too.

The passengers, about 80 adults and children of all ages, head to a campus in Huntington Beach where the parents, mostly Mexican immigrants, learn English while their children attend preschool or get homework tutorials.

The free program targeted at low-income families in a Huntington Beach neighborhood is a remarkable feat in coordination. The bus belongs to the Huntington Beach City School District, but its operation is paid for, in part, by state funds and the United Way.

The campus, a former elementary school on Pioneer Drive, belongs to the local Boys & Girls Club and Head Start, the federally funded preschool program for children of low income families.

The parents’ English teacher is provided by the Huntington Beach Union High School District’s adult education program. The Boys & Girls Club, the Orange County Children and Families Commission and the state share the costs of the academic tutors and preschool teachers.

“It is a challenge coordinating all the resources,” said Tanya Hoxsie, chief executive of the Boys & Girls Club of Huntington Valley, which serves Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley.

“But when you see it all work together, it is incredible.”

Last year, Hoxsie’s organization, an independent corporate member of the national Boys & Girls Clubs, received $15,000 from the Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign, which raises money for nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

The money set up a family resource center at the Pioneer Drive site. The center brings together government- and charity-funded programs and offers referrals to needy families for health-care services, day-care facilities and counseling, among others.

“For years, the focus of the Boys & Girls Club has been the children,” Hoxsie said. “But we found that until we take care of the families, the kids are not really taken care of.

“A kid with a toothache is not going to learn much in school,” she said.

This year, the center also helped expand the evening adult English education program, which had been housed for three years at a different site.

At the new campus, the program was able to add a preschool curriculum, thanks to the roomier quarters. Previously, the program only offered tutorials for school-age children.

“We had a dream of what we could do for the parents and this is the dream come true,” said Sunny Shroeter, a school readiness coordinator for the Children and Families Commission who started the program three years ago. “This works with the whole family.”

About 40 adults and 85 children are enrolled, Shroeter said, and nearly 30 parents attend the two-hour classes on any given evening, three times a week.

Among them is Maria Guzman, 35, who has attended the classes for three years with her two older children, Maria, now 14, and Carlos, 9. Since the program added the preschool, she has been bringing 2-year-old Andrea, too.

“My youngest is already learning the alphabet,” Guzman said proudly. “Before, I felt helpless because I couldn’t even help my kids with their homework.”

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