Santa Rosa's Piner High gives freshmen a boost

Piner High School freshman Maria Campos signed a yellow card Friday promising to spend more time at school this year — and to bring her parents with her.

Campos and her fellow Piner freshmen are part of the inaugural class of the Fulton Road campus’s 9th Grade Academy, a program that launched Friday and that is designed to assist English-language learners and Latino students and their parents navigate high school graduation requirements.

“My parents don’t really understand report cards,” Campos said, noting her parents speak Spanish and did not graduate from high school but still press her to achieve.

Campos’ situation is not unusual.

Piner’s changing demographics to a predominantly Latino student body has altered the way school officials reach out to parents, Principal Mary Beth Halsey said.

“In four years, our Hispanic population has exploded by 15 percent,” Halsey said. “We have had a real shift in who is coming to Piner at this point. That has really required us to look at things we didn’t have to look at in the past.”

In 2000, almost 68 percent of Piner’s student body was white and nearly 18 percent Latino, Halsey said. This year, 33 percent of students are white and 45 percent Latino.

“Piner has developed the reputation that we are willing to spend time educating families in the same way we spend time educating students alone,” she said.

The academy, which kicked off with a faux-graduation ceremony Friday morning replete with keynote speaker Sonoma County Supervisor Efren Carrillo giving an impassioned talk, follows the successful Parent Institute for Quality Education course the school offered to Spanish-speaking parents last year.

That nine-week primer on navigating all aspects of the school system cost the campus $10,000 — money that is unavailable this year because of budget cuts, Halsey said.

The new program is being run in-house and will ask that students and parents attend at least three evening sessions a year that will address how to understand report cards and progress reports, use the computerized student data programs, meet application and scholarship deadlines and sign students up for after-school tutorials.

Piner parent Maria Cruz said she presses her daughter to complete her homework and stay on task, even though it is difficult to assist because she speaks only Spanish. She will enroll in the program, she said Friday.

“It’s very important, 100 percent, for her to graduate,” Cruz said through a translator.

Participating parents and students will hold their first evening meeting Sept. 29.

Educators throughout the county and California are trying to develop programs to address an achievement gap between Latinos and their white peers.

In 1997, the local school population had the same demographics as the county’s overall population — about 22 percent Latino. Current figures put Latino enrollment at about 34 percent, with whites at 54 percent.

According to county statistics, two-thirds of Latino students are not proficient in English. Nearly 80 percent of white ninth-graders graduate from high school in four years, while 62 percent of Latinos graduate in four years. About 40 percent of white graduates have taken the required coursework to quality for the University of California or California State University systems, compared with about 18 percent for Latinos.

Don Russell, county Office of Education assistant superintendent, said closing the achievement gap between Latino and white students must focus on the family as well as students.

“In the early years, we put a lot of emphasis on if we really did a great job in the classroom, then that in itself was going to overcome all of the shortcomings, but we have come to the conclusion that it’s bigger than the classroom and the educator,” he said.

Carrillo, the first Latino elected to the county Board of Supervisors, urged the students not to become one of the sobering dropout statistics he recited at the beginning of his talk.

“You make a difference in this community whether you like it or not,” he said. “The question is, is it going to be a a positive difference or a negative difference?”

Freshman Martin Gaitan, who lives with his grandparents, said he feels confident he’ll successfully navigate high school and move onto higher education. But he signed up for the academy as an extra level of vigilance.

“I don’t want to be known as a dropout in my family,” he said.

Staff Writer Kerry Benefield writes an education blog at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. She can be reached at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com.