When Parents Join the Faculty : PTA: Students in schools where mom or dad are involved seem to do better. Schools are trying to welcome parents.

Larry Larsen uses the same creativity he tapped to design the popular Teddy Ruxpin talking bear when he teaches third-graders origami, the Japanese art of paper folding.

Larsen, whose son Matthew is a fourth-grade student at Justice Avenue School in West Hills, said that sitting at a table teaching the children a hands-on activity allows him a chance to make learning real.

“When I designed Teddy Ruxpin, I asked myself how I could make the best possible thing, applying all that I am and know, using something so simple--a model airplane motor--to make something unique,” Larsen said.

“Those of us who have done other things in life--aside from teaching--can share those experiences. Kids can learn the name of the planets, but an astronaut can tell them what it felt like to be in space,” Larsen said. “The easiest, most effective form of education is involvement. So I try to make it real.”

It’s that creative spirit--and the chance to show children what they can do in the real world, using what they’re learning now--that Larsen and other parents hope to offer the children they volunteer to teach.

But only a small percentage of parents actually volunteer in the classroom.

A study recently released by the National Parent-Teacher Assn. and the Dodge Division of Chrysler found that most parents, while they care about education and believe their role is extremely influential to learning, do little to help. And of those who do, a majority are more involved with fund-raising than in classroom instructional support or policy-making.

According to Cynthia Desrochers, associate professor of education at Cal State Northridge, there is a body of information referred to by educators as the effective schools research, which shows that students in schools with parent involvement have higher levels of achievement than schools without such participation.

“Meaningful parent involvement--not baking cookies--is the key,” she said. “Effective schools also tend to have, in addition to parent involvement, a principal who is an instructional leader, an orderly, well-run school plant, and high academic standards.

“Everything I read says your kids are better off if you’re visible,” Desrochers said. “Teachers--if they know a given five children in their class have active parents, for example--are going to look at these kids with a keener eye.”

Yet today most parents work, and for many there simply isn’t much unclaimed time left to allow them to actively volunteer. How do schools attract them to do more than occasionally contribute to the PTA’s bake sale or attend an open house?

Some school administrators and parent volunteers have consciously tried to create a school environment that welcomes parent involvement on campus. Carla Nino, PTA president at Encino Avenue School and president-elect of the Los Robles Council PTA, said that in this school year, parents at Encino School have contributed more than 63,000 hours of volunteer time. The key, Nino said, to getting such a high level of involvement--at a school that has almost 50% of its 630 member student body bused from other area schools--is the principal’s attitude and the openness in the school.

“What’s important is that the PTA is on an equal standing with the faculty at our school,” she said, “and the parents’ opinions are requested.”

The principal at Encino School, Orlando Martinez, 63, worked in Miami as a certified public accountant after fleeing Cuba in 1959. Moved by his volunteer experience there with refuge children, he decided to become a teacher, and has been employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District for 26 years. While teaching full time, he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in Spanish, and has been at Encino for the last five years.

Martinez said that the only way to get parents to volunteer on campus is for the principal to actively recruit them.

“You bring parents to a school. You show them in every chance you have that you like them. My doors are open. I spend a lot of time with parents; they are my clients. I have to treat them with respect. I am a public servant. It’s that simple,” he said.

Martinez added that he thinks it is that philosophy, coupled with the strength of the PTA, that brings more than 100 parent volunteers a week on campus to work in the classroom, teach aerobics, drama and dance, help in the computer room, run the library, assist on field trips, and tutor students.

Other principals have similar philosophies. Bobbie Baugh, principal at Pomelo Drive School in West Hills, started out there six years ago with only eight parents who were interested in volunteering.

“I felt then that the success of any program was with parents active in the school,” she said. So the small group started staging get-acquainted lunches, brunches and potlucks to encourage parents to volunteer, and scheduled a new-family orientation every year to explain programs and volunteer opportunities.

“We decided that the way to measure our success was by having an increase in the number of parent volunteers at the school,” said Baugh, whose 130 active volunteers--out of a school of 596 students--now teach cooking and drill team classes, support the school’s Getty Art program, provide classroom tutoring, teaching and support, and conduct special school spirit events.

Laurie Markowitz, 37, who has two daughters at Pomelo, was once a physical education teacher at Birmingham High. When Baugh heard that Markowitz had been a drill team coach, she recruited her as a volunteer to start and run the school’s 65-student drill team for girls from kindergarten to fifth grade.

The drill team meets after school for an hour a week and performs at least one show a month school-wide. Markowitz said she loves the time she spends with the drill team and feels the program helps the children build confidence and self-esteem, develop good posture, learn to memorize routines and have fun.

“What I love about Pomelo is that here, everything’s for the kids. And I also like volunteering because I can see what’s happening at the school.”

Learning more about the school and having a chance to see the classrooms up close are reasons many parents cite for volunteering their time. “I like to see what’s going on in the classroom,” said Robin Little of Sherman Oaks, who has one son in kindergarten at Sherman Oaks School and another in the third grade at Kester Avenue Gifted and High Achieving Magnet in Van Nuys. She works part time, but volunteers in the classroom and in fund-raising at both schools.

“Kids don’t always tell you what goes on,” she said.

But Little also said she has seen some parents who seem ineffective in the classroom and warned that classroom participation doesn’t work for all teachers or all parents.

“I don’t think every parent has an absolute right to work with kids in the class. The teacher does have a right to control the classroom,” she said.

Little said she has seen some parents be disruptive in the classroom, “being too buddy-buddy with the kids, or noisy. And some parents, any time anything happens in the classroom that they question, they call the school office. I have sympathy for teachers,” she added.

Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said he basically wants parents to support the classroom teacher by giving the children a good night’s sleep and good food.

“But I don’t particularly need parents’ help in the classroom,” he said. “If the teachers want the parents’ help and they can work that out, that’s fine. But we’re leery of a program where a parent knocks on the door and says, ‘I’m your parent, and I’m going to teach your class today,’ ” he said.

But some parents see their role as crucial, both in the classroom and in school site policy-making.

Bea Stotzer, president of the PTA at Kester Avenue School, said that “without the direct involvement of parents in the school, how do we know it’s effective for the kids? The teachers are responsible for our children’s achievement but they are not accountable.”

Stotzer said that teachers who don’t want parents in the classroom are afraid of being forced to answer to their customers, the parents.

Yet many parents first get involved in the classroom not so much to observe or oversee, but rather to offer help, Sidney Farivar, assistant professor of elementary education at CSUN, said that most of the volunteering she sees in schools is either clerical assistance--cutting up paper for art projects, grading multiple-choice tests--or teaching mini-courses that provide enrichment.

Yet once there, parents can get caught up in what they see. “A lot of people like to volunteer in the classroom because they think it may help their child if they can function as a line-blocker,” said Farivar. “Some of it is spying to see what is going on in the classroom. And then you have a lot of gossiping going on between parents, comparing one child to another,” she said.

Farivar said she is not only concerned that parents can sometimes say or do inappropriate things in the classroom, but also that privacy issues come up when parents compare notes with one another.

She also said the schools that have the most affluent parents may have more involvement, but the teachers pay for it by having to field more questions from parents. She said parents are volunteering in the schools partly to evaluate them, weighing whether their local public school is satisfactory or whether they should change to a private school.

“We’re seeing this whole me-generation growing up and wanting the best for their children,” Farivar said. “They’re saying, ‘I want you, the teacher, to be accountable to me. ‘ A lot of teachers don’t want to deal with that. They want parents out of the classroom.”

Administrators at the schools with a lot of parent involvement, however, seem to be working to encourage teachers to become comfortable with the concept of the parent as partner. Lois Bloch, site administrator at Justice Avenue School, said that she looks at the school as a partnership. “We all have a mutually owned interest in the child,” she said.

Bloch, who has been at the campus for 1 1/2 years, credits parent involvement for the turnaround the school has recently enjoyed. “Two years ago, the school had a lot of negatives and was suffering from low self-esteem,” she said, referring to the campus’s unique all-metal buildings that make both hot and cold days more difficult to bear and to an enrollment so low that the school didn’t qualify for a principal.

But now Justice has more than 450 students--half of whom are bused from overcrowded schools--and a force of 30 to 35 active volunteers. Parent-sponsored programs range from semi-annual career days to a recent bike rodeo, an after-school and lunch-hour library program, parent-organized field trips and a monthly enrichment day.

What Bloch has been telling the parents she recruits for the school, she tells the teachers as well: “I really believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy: You’re as good as you see yourself being.” She added that when she came to Justice, the school had a nucleus of parents who were looking for someone to make it work, and together they’ve built from there.

For many parents, the greatest benefits of volunteering include not just the hope of greater student achievement, but also the joy their own children experience from seeing their mothers and fathers on campus.

Desrochers, who sometimes volunteers at her daughter Vanessa’s school in Los Angeles, said that when she taught a mini-course in making clay planters to her daughter’s class, Vanessa was delighted.

“Now she knows I can teach, and it’s a bond we share because we did it together--at school,” Desrochers said.