District serves up wealth of advice for Latino parents.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - Class was in session Saturday afternoon at Springfield Middle School, but not for kids.

Instead, Spanish-speaking parents, some with children in tow, showed up to attend workshops on job-hunting, nutrition, bicultural problems, positive discipline and involvement in their children's education.

When the workshops were over, they spilled into a hallway where representatives of more than 20 government agencies and social service providers sat behind desks waiting to provide information about everything from getting a driver's license to agricultural pesticides.

Guadalupe Moreno, coordinator of the Lane Education Service District's Migrant Education Program, estimated that 35 families were represented at Saturday's Latino Family Conference.

More than twice that number attended a similar event in February, but Moreno was not discouraged by the lower turnout. The first conference, six years ago, attracted only three families, she said.

"That was so sad," she said. "It's difficult for people to attend this kind of event," she said, especially in autumn if the weather is good. "Many people are working on Saturdays. You can just never tell how many will show up."

Along with the workshops and information tables, another purpose of the conference was to let people know about classes scheduled to start in January, including basic computer skills, Lane Community College's English Language Learner classes and a 10-week course in positive discipline.

When adults from Spanish-speaking countries move to the United States, they have to learn an entirely different approach to disciplining their children, Moreno said. "It's a shock to them."

Inability to speak English as well as their children do also makes it difficult for parents to communicate with teachers and administrators or to help their children with homework and research projects, Moreno said.

Nancy Wray, co-director for the migrant education program, is also an English Language Learner specialist with the Springfield School District. She said Springfield has the most ELL students and the most migrant students in the Eugene-Springfield area.

The Migrant Education Program is working to improve language and learning-skills in other ways, too.

One is a home-visit program to help pre-schoolers (ages 3 to 5) learn colors, counting and fine motor skills before entering kindergarten. Nine families are taking advantage of that program.

In another program, Spanish-speaking kindergartners get an extra hour of schooling each day, in Spanish or bilingual instruction. Wray said research indicates that kids who are literate in Spanish learn English four times as fast as those who are not; and students from the Kinder-Plus program, now in its third year, test four or five months ahead of others on the language learning curve.

"We don't want kids to lose their Spanish," Wray said. "There's such a need for bilingual speakers."

Moreno, who works for Wray and co-director Jackie Turle to organize program activities, came to the United States from Mexico knowing no English. She studied English for two years at LCC, got a job as a receptionist with the migrant program and in 1997 became one of the first bilingual teaching assistants in Springfield schools.

Back then, the district had just six such assistants. Today it has 20, and Springfield High School has a bilingual assistant principal, Carmen Gelman. She and several Spanish-speaking Springfield High students made introductory remarks at Saturday's conference.

As of Aug. 31, Lane County altogether had 633 migrant students between the ages of 3 and 21. Of those, 510 were in school and 123 were not. Willamette ESD, covering Linn, Benton, Lincoln and Yamhill counties, had 4,046, the highest in the state.