It’s late. Dinner time for most people. That time when the sun is at its golden best. The perfect type of light for reading outside on a picnic table, which is where Reina Cortes sits as she listens to one of her classmates read to her 6-year-old daughter, Abigail.
All around her, Latino parents like Reina sit with their children in their laps or by their side, reading a story about parades. It’s not so unusual. Except that three weeks ago Reina spoke little English. At home, she would read to Abigail in Spanish.
After seven years of struggling to make herself understood at the post office, at the doctor’s office, with nurses and with teachers, Reina said, That’s it.”
It’s time that I learned to speak English,” says Reina, a stay-at-home mom who emigrated from Mexico seven years ago. I should have started studying the minute I got here, but I had my kids, and now here I am.”
Like Reina, Rosalva and Eliseo Benitez joined the Family Literacy/Community Based English Tutoring program, created last year by the Santa Ana Unified School District and Santa Ana College, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to help their son in school unless they helped themselves.
In our son’s school, English is a necessity. The teachers send you notes in English, and you don’t understand,” says Rosalva Benitez, mother to 6-year-old Eliseo Jr. English helps you get a better job and helps you help your kids in school.”
As we talk, her husband, with their 4-year-old daughter, Edith, in his lap, reads the same bilingual story as the other parents in class.
How many kids are there?” Eliseo Benitez asks Edith in Spanish. Pointing to the book he counts out the numbers in English as she repeats the numbers after him. One, two, three, four and one adult, five!”
These parents — all 16 who attend the 2 1/2 hour family literacy class twice a week — are working-class people. Upholsterers and gardeners who wake early to make it to work and stay up late to finish homework.
Many of them show up for class an extra two days to receive tutoring, also offered by the program.
Reina laments waiting seven years, but in the larger scheme, she’s just in time. Some Latino parents never take the step she’s taken to get involved in her child’s education.
The result?
In the past 10 years, more than a quarter-million Latino students statewide have dropped out of California public high schools, according to figures from the California Department of Education.
Countywide, of the roughly 27,000 12th grade Latino graduates last year, only 15.9 percent had completed all the courses required for University of California and/or California State University entrance, also according the California Department of Education.
This is the lowest percentage of every ethnic group listed in the state’s statistics.
You can blame the schools, our politicians or our teachers, but in all the finger pointing, when do the parents take responsibility?
Many are immigrants raised in Latin American societies where teachers are among the most revered figures — along with doctors and priests — and are not supposed to be challenged.
Ana Landrian remembers how in Cuba, schools were typically two or three rooms. When her parents arrived in Santa Ana, they were suddenly thrust into a school world of hundreds of children, open houses and teachers who wanted their input.
It’s not that (Latino parents) don’t care, it’s that they don’t know (how),” says Landrian, Santa Ana Unified School District curriculum specialist for the Community Based English Tutoring program.
For more than 30 years, Santa Ana College has offered English as a Second Language classes for adults at elementary-school sites, but realizing that parents needed more than just language skills, school officials created the Family Literacy program.
Before, only 10 percent of the ESL participants were parents, says Melinda Roberts, the family literacy facilitator for Santa Ana College. Today, 90 percent of those in the Family Literacy classes are parents.
While parents are taught to read, write and speak in English, they are also taught how to read with their children and help them with their homework.
As they learn to read a book, Family Literacy program teacher Roberto Flores teaches parents that each story has a main idea, characters and conflicts. They learn to make predictions about the story line and talk about how conflicts are resolved in the story.
The results? Some are immediate. There are parents with children who are students of Roberto. His full-time job is teaching a fourth-grade class at Lydia Romero-Cruz elementary school, where the family literacy program is taught.
When it’s time for parent conferences, the parent doesn’t hesitate to come to us because he’s familiar with the teacher, he knows him or her and understands exactly how that teacher is working,” Roberto says.
Long term, it’s difficult to determine what effect this will have on the children of Reina, Rosalva and Eliseo. Ten years from now, another set of statistics will be tallied — statistics that hopefully will reflect the effort these parents are making.
When I ask Roberto, who logs 13-hour days, why he gives so much, he nods at the parents.
If they take the time to be here, that’s what motivates me,” Roberto says. They’re so determined to get an education they don’t want to take a summer break.”
As I leave the picnic tables, I look back and see the parents still talking to their children, explaining words and laughing aloud about the book they’re sharing.
I walk away and the sun has not yet set.
See this column Friday for the second in this series of columns on Latinos and education to learn how Costa Mesa mother Claudia Cecilia Sermeno took the next step to familiarize herself with the school system to help her children make it to college.
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