LESSONS IN LAST CHANCES TEACHER SPENDS SUMMER HELPING KIDS QUALIFY FOR PROMOTION.

Byline: Erik Nelson Staff Writer

VAN NUYS - Tell Iris Cantu she carried the future of 20 kids on her shoulders this summer, and she'll just shrug and smile.

In some respects, trying to bring second- and third-graders back from the brink of failure was just a summer job for the 27-year-old teacher at Cohasset Street School in Van Nuys. After her fourth year teaching second grade, she, like many other Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, wanted an extra few paychecks to get her through the summer.

Now done with the remedial reading class, Cantu looks back on her summer of service with gratitude for having the chance to make a difference in the lives of students who needed some extra help.

``It was stressful, because you feel the pressure not only of being a teacher, but of getting those kids to progress in a short period of time,'' she said as she prepared for her new role of kindergarten teacher in a new classroom at Cohasset.

What she got was the chance to teach a class of 20 second- and third-graders to read and then write about what they'd read. This, despite the fact that most have trouble with English and seven of them were in jeopardy of being retained in the second grade if they didn't pass the class.

Following a national trend that has been the subject of presidential stump speeches, elected officials have compelled all schools in the state to abandon social promotion. That means students cannot advance to the next grade if they are not ready.

The school year just beginning is the first in a quarter-century in which LAUSD children weren't all socially promoted. Notified at the end of last year, second- and eighth-grade students who didn't meet promotion requirements were given one last chance to get their reading and English skills up to par before repeating a grade.

At Cohasset, Cantu was that chance.

``It was a difficult position to be in,'' she said. ``Normally, it's: Well, I know their potential. It's only going to take so long for them to click.''

But this time, she had no choice but to make it click in only six weeks or recommend that the children be retained in the second grade.

And hers was not a school where such students are an anomaly, explained Cohasset principal Cherie Spamer.

``We have a very high transient rate, so they're always catching up,'' Spamer said of the students, 97 percent of whom are eligible for subsidized lunches because their parents have low incomes.

But in Cantu's summer intervention class, ``I could see definite big gains, because I came in and was reading with the children myself.''

On the one hand, Cantu was concerned that failure to pass ``may ruin the child's self-esteem,'' she said. On the other hand, ``When I was receiving nonreaders (promoted from first grade), that blew me away.''

So she went about helping her charges vault that hurdle.

``My best moments were catching the kids reading to each other,'' she said. Her worst, ``as a professional, were reading some of the writing samples and realizing, wow, these kids are supposed to be in the third grade. That's actually really depressing.''

But in the long run, Cantu believes the district's new strategy of using the same reading instruction system for all of its elementary schools will pay off, especially for children who must constantly move from school to school.

The irony, she predicts, will be that once they're elected, ``the new political people, they're going to be able to say, See, we did it!'' But long before the elections, Cantu can partly make that claim herself.

``I was able to recommend three of them (for promotion to third grade), and one was a push,'' she said, referring to a borderline case. ``That child had moments of performing wonderfully, but I struggled with him: Write something! Write anything! Some days he'd be on target.''

With the other three students, ``there was no way around it,'' and she recommended that they be retained. ``I felt bad for them, but that's the way it is.''

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Photo: (color) Iris Cantu, who spend the summer with kids in danger of being held back in second grade, prepares lessons for the coming school year, when

she'll teach kindergarten at Cohasset Street School in Van Nuys.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer