Parent involvement key issue

By Emily Richmond

Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2004 | 9:20 a.m.

The next forum, to discuss teacher quality, will be held from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday at Simmons Elementary School, 2328 Silver Clouds Drive, North Las Vegas.

Organizers of a series of Clark County School Board community forums had the opportunity to do something different Tuesday: set up extra chairs to accommodate the crowd.

Nearly 100 people came to Hollingsworth Elementary School's cafeteria for the fourth of a series of seven meetings on a variety of education-related topics, including at least 40 parents and 20 children. That's more than double the audience at any of the three previous forums, organizers said.

It was appropriate that the best turnout of the series thus far was for the discussion on parental involvement, said Dale Erquiaga of R&R Partners, which is coordinating the forums for the School Board. A private grant is covering the cost of the forums, including a survey of registered voters used to determine the seven discussion topics.

The School Board invited a cross-section of community leaders, educators and parents to serve as panelists for each of the forums. Included on the panel Tuesday were university Regent Thalia Dondero, Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce board members Cornelius Eason and Steve Horsford, chief executive of Nevada Partners, a vocational training program co-sponsored by the Culinary Union.

While not all of the parents at the meeting have children attending Hollingsworth, the audience's demographics closely reflected those of the school's 75 percent Hispanic student body.

More than a dozen people huddled in a semi-circle around a member of the School Board office staff, who translated the speakers' comments from English into Spanish.

Patricia Lopez, the mother of three Clark County students and a panelist, said she realized that for many of the district's families the language barrier discouraged them from participating more fully in their children's education.

"They feel intimidated to come to school," Lopez said. "Parents need to know they can come in and volunteer for a half-hour. There's always somebody who needs help -- ask the music teacher, ask the librarian."

For the past three years the Clark County School District's student body has been a "minority majority" with 45.9 percent white, 31.8 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black, 7.5 percent Asian and less than 1 percent American Indian.

Audience member Rosa Gamboa, who graduated from Vo-Tech High School in 1992, urged Spanish-speaking parents to demonstrate their commitment to their children's education, regardless of their own proficiency in the English language.

"My mother doesn't speak any English and she's been here 25 years," said Gamboa, whose son is in the pre-kindergarten program at Hollingsworth. "But she went to every school meeting, she sat at the table with us every night while we did our homework. Maybe we don't understand a word, but we have to be there for our children."

During the 2003-04 academic year more than 1,500 parents participated in English as a Second Language classes offered at 19 campuses, said Maurice Flores, superintendent of the district's east region, which has the highest population of Hispanic students.

While the parents were in the classroom, their children were able to get extra homework help from volunteers, Flores said.

"We're not as big as we need to be but it's a start," Flores said of the 18-month-old program. "We're in the process of making it bigger and better."

Not all communication problems between parents, schools and the district are based on language, said Kimberly Tate, vice president of the Nevada PTA and a forum panelist.

There's too much reliance, by both school officials and parents, on what Tate termed the "backpack express." Parents need access to more information than just the notes ferried home from school by students, Tate said. She added that the only reason she knew about Tuesday's forum was that she had been personally invited. The district should be advertising such events on KLVX Channel 10 in both English and Spanish, Tate said.

Panelist Jim Hager, former superintendent of the Washoe County School District and now a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, encouraged Clark County to follow Washoe's lead and establish a "parental involvement strategic plan." Washoe also has a full-time parental involvement coordinator, a position Tate said the PTA has been urging Clark County to add for years.

Shomari and Shawanna Williams said they brought their three young sons to Tuesday's meeting because they wanted to hear more about how they could be involved at Hollingsworth, where their eldest boy is in kindergarten.

Too often parents skip the open houses and parent-teacher meetings because "everything's OK," Shomari Williams said.

"Unfortunately there's a lot of negative reinforcement; parents pay attention only when something is going wrong or the kid is in trouble," Williams said. "Parents need to be active all the time, even when everything is positive."