Educators often highlight the role of parents: the more parents are engaged in their children’s education, the better the children’s school attendance and academic performance. Recent research on parental educational engagement in low-income communities supports this view.
For parents, how much they can get involved in their children’s education is often a matter of economics. Taking time off for a parent-teacher conference or school functions is costly for low-wage workers. Language and cultural differences may also cause immigrant parents to think twice about participating, especially if school systems operate differently from those they knew at home.
The Abriendo Puertas (Opening Doors) Parental Communication Initiative was started in 2003 by Texas A&M University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to increase high school graduation and college enrollment in South Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley. Parent volunteers in rural subdivisions known as colonias receive training and then train other parents in how to become more engaged in their children’s education.
Abriendo Puertas uses a “community empowerment” outreach model based on similar approaches long used in developing countries for public education campaigns. The approach was first used 20 years ago by the program’s co-founder, Dr. Ida Acuña-Garza, to teach professional sewing skills to women who then taught others to sew for their families and to earn extra income. This “train-the-trainer” approach proved so successful that it was later used by the sewing program’s sponsor, the AgriLife Extension service, to deliver nutrition and medical information to the predominantly Spanish-speaking colonia residents.
After becoming concerned about high rates of school dropout in South Texas, Acuña-Garza developed Abriendo Puertas’ “core lessons” on child and adolescent development, how to succeed in and graduate from high school, and how to access post-secondary education. The lessons are organized as a series of easy-to-understand flipcharts that parent volunteers can share with friends, neighbors, and family members in small group settings, whether across kitchen tables, on front porches, or in church halls. Over a five-year period, nearly 500 volunteers have trained more than 26,000 parents.
One of these volunteers is Carmen De Leon of colonia Llano Grande, located on the outskirts of Weslaco, TX. De Leon had been trained as an AgriLife Extension sewing volunteer before starting as a part-time parent outreach worker with the Weslaco school district 17 years ago. She first responded to the invitation to be trained as an Abriendo Puertas volunteer six years ago out of a concern to learn and do even more in her community. “I already knew much about sewing, and I gave classes,” explains De Leon. “I liked Abriendo Puertas because I said to myself that we as parents should help our children in everything that has to do with education. We should never tell them they can’t reach the goals they set for themselves.”
De Leon converted a small building next to her humble home in the colonia into a community center, where she trained parents while her daughter Brenda, who was then in middle school, tutored their children. They even started a small lending library using discarded books from schools and libraries. Thanks to their efforts, more of their neighbors’ children have graduated from high school or earned GEDs and continued on to postsecondary education. “I go every year to the graduations,” De Leon says with pride, “and as soon as the program is over, I go and congratulate ‘my kids’ from the colonia.” This year, she celebrated another milestone: her own daughter’s graduation from the local community college, with plans to continue on for a bachelor’s degree.
“Our outreach model is based on the two core beliefs that all parents want a better life for their children, and that committed volunteers can be found in all communities, at all income levels,” says Abriendo Puertas’ president, Dr. Hector Aldape. “We are dispelling the myth that Hispanic parents and low-income parents don’t care about their children’s education. Often, all they need is information and encouragement, especially coming from a parent just like them who says, ‘If I can do it and my kids can do it, so can you and your kids.’”
Abriendo Puertas continues to expand, with projects currently underway in Laredo and Houston, TX, and in Washington state.
Felipe Salinas is the director of development and grant administration for the Abriendo Puertas Parental Communication Initiative in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University.
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