SAN FRANCISCO – A program offering parenting classes tailored to Latino families is showing hope equally a way to aid children arrive in kindergarten ready to larn, a key early benchmark that educators say can help close entrenched achievement gaps across racial and economic lines.

The national program, called Abriendo Puertas, offers classes in more than than fourscore California cities and was the subject field of a University of California, Berkeley study showing that parents who took the classes gained a meliorate understanding of how their children learn and how they can assistance prepare their children for school. The plan reflects a growing awareness that promoting early parental engagement in a child'southward education is key to his or her academic success later on.

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Flor Alvarez hugs her daughter Sophia, three, during an Abriendo Puertas grade May 28 at the Bayview Hunter'south Indicate Family Resource Center in San Francisco. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource Today

Researchers said Latino families are in particular need of this intervention because of low levels of adult education, minimal focus on reading to children at dwelling and a lack of knowledge nigh how young children learn. Latino children are also historically less likely to nourish preschool than their black, white and Asian peers, which makes the care and education they are receiving at dwelling particularly of import. On pinnacle of that, many Latino children with Spanish-speaking parents must learn English language as a second language to be successful in school.

Last yr, Latino students as a group received a score on the country's Academic Performance Index of 740, compared to 852 for whites and 905 for Asians. The API is a composite score on a scale of 200 to 1000 based on multiple standardized tests administered each year in California schools. This gap is axiomatic earlier students even get-go school. Latino children as young as two years old already lag behind white children in both linguistic communication and cognitive skills, according to a written report past the Academy of California, Berkeley Constitute for Human Development.

"It becomes really important to think nigh how we can work with parents and make some changes that might affect that," said Margaret Bridges, a developmental psychologist at the Institute who co-authored the report measuring the touch of Abriendo Puertas classes on parents' cognition about child development and parenting techniques.

The 10-session Abriendo Puertas – "Opening Doors" in Spanish – curriculum is designed to come across the specific needs of Latino families with young children. Classes cover topics from the importance of reading at home as a way to instill early language skills and prepare children for school, to healthy nutritional habits, to positive discipline. For instance, in the class on literacy, parents acquire that they can teach young children early literacy skills in Spanish that will translate to English language literacy skills after. The idea is to gainsay the low academic functioning of Latino children by showing their first teachers, their parents, the best ways to interact with and teach young children at home and to abet for them in one case they go to schoolhouse.

Abriendo Puertas classes are offered in 196 cities and 31 states, including more 200 locations in California. The gratuitous classes are offered to low-income parents with children ranging from infants to age 5. The weekly two-hour classes are offered through local family resource centers. The centers are often attached to a school or kid care facility and offer a range of services from child care and preschool to mental health and family counseling and legal advice. Classes are meant to exist scheduled at times that working parents, many of whom accept not-traditional hours, tin can easily attend.

The national program is funded with grants from Boeing and the Kellogg Foundation and with back up from an anonymous philanthropist. Any organization wishing to accept staff trained in teaching the curriculum tin pay $2,000 per staff member, or apply for scholarships, for a three-day grooming from the national program. The price of the training includes program materials and prepares trainees to teach other local experts to facilitate the classes.

This model is called "railroad train the trainers" and is meant to ensure parents learn from community members with whom they share an equal basis. The Berkeley study was washed on classes taught past this second generation of trainers and shows the model tin can exist effective, Bridges said.

The program was first developed in 2007 with significant input from Latina mothers, said Sandra Gutierrez, the program's national director. The classes are infused with elements of the Latino culture.

"We did a lot of listening," Gutierrez said. "The voices of the parents are in the curriculum. That's why parents like it."

The Berkeley report used surveys of 625 participants in 35 different classes in six states to determine that parents in the classes showed a pregnant growth in their agreement of the topics covered. Eighty-6 percent of those participants were immigrants and more than one-half of them had not finished high school. Researchers administered pre- and post-form surveys to participants asking near each of the x subject area areas covered past the form. Parents showed significant improvement in their understanding of all x, including a amend grasp of how their children learn at early ages, ways to promote linguistic communication and literacy skills and how to meliorate set their children for schoolhouse.

"(Parents) were gaining a lot of applied knowledge about ways they were interacting with their children in more than effective ways," Bridges said.

While the current enquiry shows that the program has a clear effect on parents' cognition, there is not however articulate information on how the program affects the children of those parents. A study is existence conducted in Los Angeles that will compare the outcomes of children whose parents attend Abriendo Puertas classes and children from similar socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds whose parents do non attend the classes. Gutierrez said results of that study are expected in 2014.

Gutierrez is confident that the new written report will evidence that her program is helping children besides as adults. She said parent engagement hasn't risen to the tiptop of the reform calendar nevertheless, simply she thinks that's where it should be.

"Parents are undervalued and there's a need to invest in parents to better schools and student outcomes," Gutierrez said. "The more families are engaged, the healthier state we're going to take."

Yuliana Velazquez recently graduated from the outset Abriendo Puertas class to be offered in the rural boondocks of Lost Hills, almost Bakersfield in the Central Valley.

"I started coming to this program considering my kids wouldn't listen," said Velazquez, a mother of a ii-yr-old and a 4-twelvemonth-quondam. "They would stress me out. There was a point when I just didn't want to come up home later on piece of work."

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A sign describing the focus on the day'south lesson during an Abriendo Puertas session at a family resource eye in San Francisco is illustrated in the style of the popular Mexican bingo game called "lotería." May 28, 2013. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource Today

Velazquez grew upwardly in the United states, and had her kickoff kid when she was 18. She said she needed to acquire how to talk to her kids, ways to bear witness them that they are her priority and what she can practice to help them succeed in school.

In some other attempt to connect to Latino parents, Abriendo Puertas works proverbs, by and large of Mexican origin, into the curriculum and uses illustrations based on the pop Mexican bingo game known as "loterÍa" in all its materials.

A recent Tuesday afternoon form at the Bayview Hunter's Point Family unit Resources Center in San Francisco focused on the importance of parents taking care of their own emotional wellness to better intendance for their kids. A poster-sized illustration in the front of the room showed a mother and daughter looking at each other on a bright reddish background in classic loterÍa mode. Tacked to a higher place a Tv set monitor displaying the Powerpoint for the solar day's grade was a handwritten sign reading, "Cada cabeza es un mundo," which translates to: "Each head is a world."

Ana Moreno, a foster female parent of 3 and a Peruvian immigrant, heard about the classes during a visit to her local library. "It'southward helped me a lot, every 24-hour interval," Moreno said in Castilian.

Moreno, who does not have children of her ain, was well-nigh tears in expressing her gratitude for the classes. Learning about child development has helped her better provide for all three of her foster children: a toddler and two older children, she said. She and her eldest foster girl both suffered abuse as children and Moreno said that made information technology difficult for them to trust each other. Moreno said the classes, several of which teach techniques for communicating with children, have helped her to gain her daughter'southward trust. Now she and her daughter can talk more openly, she said, and that has led to meliorate behavior and more confidence.

Rosario Velazquez is the instance manager for the Lost Hills Family unit Resource Center. She said that she became interested in offering the Abriendo Puertas plan in her rural community because of its focus on Latino parents.

"My goal is for (parents) to recognize and identify their potential in being advocates for their kids' education," she said. "Information technology's a program that I would take liked to be present in my community before now."