Regrets of a Tutor: Was It Enough?

The photo is in a drawer at home. I never dated it, but time flies, and it probably goes back seven or eight years. It shows an 11-year-old girl standing next to a tree and wearing a flowing blue dress and a light shawl.

It was taken the day of her fifth-grade graduation from a Santa Ana elementary school, and I have a print because for an hour a week during the semester I was her reading tutor.

Back then, I flattered myself to think we bonded -- enough so that she invited me to graduation and to pose for pictures with her and her mother. The girl’s name was Viridiana, and she’d be surprised to know how often I’ve wondered since then what became of her.

She is very much on my mind this week after reading the first two parts of a Times series on the dropout rate at a Van Nuys high school. Of 1,087 freshmen who enrolled in 2001, 582 graduated. The other 505 either didn’t graduate or we couldn’t determine what happened to them.

Those figures grabbed me, because the Van Nuys high school shares some similarities with one Viridiana likely attended. That is, if she stayed in Santa Ana, she would have attended schools with heavy Latino populations and where many students either were immigrants or children of immigrants and dealing with English as a second language.

John Palacio, now starting his eighth year as a Santa Ana school board member, says the high school dropout rate is around 45% in the city. He doesn’t trust figures that show it lower, because he thinks the state has a poor methodology for determining the rates.

Something else in the stories grabbed my attention: the disclosure that algebra is the No. 1 bugaboo facing students taking the exit exam as a requirement for graduation.

That brings me back to Viridiana and the real subject of my little thesis today: the value of one-on-one mentoring for young students. Although my assigned duty with her was reading, I soon realized she had arithmetic problems too. She wasn’t sure how to multiply double digits, such as 23 times 45.

I showed her how to do it. I watched her “get it,” even as my satisfaction in helping was tempered by the frustration of my limited time. And now I read that failing to grasp algebra, as Viridiana certainly would have experienced without basic arithmetic skills, spawns dropouts.

Am I nuts? Naive? Hopelessly idealistic to think that a broad mentoring program could drastically reduce students’ problems with the algebra monster? And, by extension, take a bite out of dropout rates?

Mia Castillo thinks not. She’s with THINK Together, a nonprofit organization in Santa Ana that matches about 1,500 volunteers with 4,000 students at all grade levels.

“In a class setting, they can pay attention or they cannot,” she says. “It’s not easily noticeable by the teacher because he or she is teaching a class of 30 to 40 students. But in one-on-one, sometimes all that student needs is to realize, ‘OK, you’re paying attention to me and you’re keeping me on track.’ When they do that, they pay attention more and are eager to please, so they want to get it done and show you they’ve got it.”

It’s absurd that bad math skills affect graduation rates. Absurd, because a broader commitment to mentoring young students could make a huge difference.

In short, it’s the seemingly overwhelming societal problem with the highly doable fix.

I know it’s more complicated than this. But in many, many cases, it isn’t. It’s as simple as adults steering young students -- before they get jaded -- in the right direction.

I don’t know if Viridiana, clearly at risk as a fifth-grader, got a high school diploma or not. If my time frame is right, she’s at least 18 years old. However deluded I may be, it drives me nuts to think that if I’d been able to hang in there with her for longer than a semester, her academic life -- and maybe her future -- might have been a little easier.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.