School Issues Draw Comment

Re “Parents Must Take Role in Education,” Voices, May 18:

Eileen Spatz seems to imply that parents need to get involved in their children’s education because schools don’t seem to be doing as good a job as they can. But the communication between parents and school is necessary for many other reasons.

I teach in a school, and district, where we get a great deal of parent involvement and communication. But it is not nearly enough! There are so many students whose parents are always too busy! Too busy to come to parent conferences (held twice a year, but in fact available any time a parent wants one); too busy to discuss report cards and progress reports--they just sign them and send them back--too busy to sign and return tests, notes, and other communication sent home by teachers to keep parents aware of student progress.

And this time of the year it never fails! Suddenly many of those same parents want to know how a child can bring up a failing grade, what the school has been doing to prevent failure, what has been going on all year. And the invariable, “Why wasn’t I informed of this?”

Those rumors about how our schools are failing, how teachers don’t teach and how terrible our education system has become are seldom the case. We work very hard at our profession. But unless we get parent support and parent involvement on some level, our efforts are very diminished. Educating children depends on all of us adults, whether we have children or not. We need to communicate regularly, keep aware of what is going on, work for positive change. It’s the only way to the success we all want.

HEATHER SMITH

Fountain Valley

* What is all the Orange County rhetoric about “back to basics” and “English immersion”? Do we really know what direction that rhetoric will take our kids? Are we going to properly prepare our children to the year 2001?

If a school district is composed of a majority of children such that English is a second language to them, are back to basics and English immersion the correct tools to properly bring them into the mainstream? Are these programs really set up to benefit those that are already fluent in English?

What we need in Orange County are visionary school board members not afraid to reach up into the arena of high technology seeking programs that will accelerate the learning process of those children who lack the proficiency in English that most of us take for granted.

If those programs require assistance in the primary language of the pupil, so be it. The children cannot afford to waste time and good tax dollars on questionable programs in use 40 or more years ago. We need to wake up, open our eyes to available programs that will intellectually fast-track those children into the year 2001.

Maybe the problem lies in that the newly elected school boards in Orange County, their educational level may be so much lower than the PhD administrators running our schools. Maybe they are following some ideology, trying to change the world by going backward?

Our future lies in all the students. Technology is moving, changing so fast, we need technology in the schoolroom for a bright tomorrow for all of our children.

LORENZO LUERA

Westminster

* Several fine critiques on the merits of “School to Work” have been written in the Orange County papers lately. I submit that school-to-work is fatally flawed on principle alone because it violates the clear intent of the Constitution that education and labor are objects for state and local governments only!

The Founders were the most educated men of their day. They obviously knew the value of education, and many actively supported it. Yet they purposely omitted any mention of education from the Constitution.

However, there is one well-known document that advocates centralized “combination of education with industrial production, etc.” Those exact words are from the 10th plank of “The Communist Manifesto.”

Orange County: Keep our money/control local. If we love freedom, we must refuse federal education programs. They are dangerously un-American because they are unconstitutional!

STEVEN A. JACKSON

Fountain Valley