How parents are filling the gap in public school

Over the past three academic years, the San Rafael City School District has seen $4 million cut out of its elementary and middle school budgets. And this year, it's trying to run its schools and educate its students with about $1.5 million less than it had last year. Schools like Davidson are relying on parents more and more to absorb some of the weight of the cuts to school programs.

KALW’s Nancy Mullane went to San Rafael to see how parents were filling the gap.

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NANCY MULLANE: Middle school is just that. It’s halfway between being a child in elementary school and being almost an adult in high school. In those transition years, there are certain coming of age rituals that just have to happen. And one of those is the middle school dance.

The parents of Davidson Middle School know just how important things like Friday night dances are, and they aren’t going to let a little budget crisis dampen their kids expectations.

JOHN DALLARA: We’re just going to turn off the fluorescents and make it a little more fun for the kids. A little dark but still light enough to see. Just throw it around – it seems to work. They enjoy it.

MULLANE: Light enough for you to see?

DALLARA: Yeah, and for the moms to patrol the dance floor.

John Dallara is a project manager for an electrical contractor. He’s also the father of an eighth grade son and a sixth grade daughter at Davidson Middle School.

DALLARA:  They’re not going to remember the bad time they had in math or the English test they didn’t do very well on. But they’ll remember their first dance and how much fun it was and all the things that went on there.

MULLANE: If there’s enough people to put a dance on?

DALLARA: Yeah, otherwise it would be a dark gym with music. The kids like it too. My daughter wasn’t sure at first if she wanted me here, and then she settled in and actually came and said hi to me at the last dance.

MULLANE: Did she dance with you?

DALLARA: No, she wouldn’t go that far.

With just an hour to go, about half of the school’s 800 kids arrive. Moms, dads and some students are scrambling to get colorful posters hung and lights strung up to give the cavernous gym a cool, dark, festive feel.

INTERCOM: Custodian please come to the main office to see the assistant principal. Thank you.

Suddenly there’s a call over the intercom. Someone forgot to arrange for a custodian to stay and help clean up after the dance.

GROUP OF PARENTS: You’re joking. Wait, wait, wait. You’re joking.

Judy Tuatagaloa is standing with another mom, Jamie Bree, in the middle of the gym. They say parents will pick up the slack. It happens all the time.

JUDY TUATAGALOA AND JAMIE BREE: Whether it’s yard duty or helping kids learn to read, increasing fluency or putting together a fundraiser ‘cause we want P.E., we want art or getting Kleenex. Or there’s no staff at the schools anymore that do those things. P.E. isn’t just funded. Art isn’t just funded. You don’t have aides in the office who can send out marketing programs for an upcoming event so parents have to fill those holes with their different skills sets. Otherwise it just won’t happen.

And, Tuatagaloa says, it just doesn’t happen at many schools.

TUATAGALOA: It breaks my heart every time I drive by a school and know they don’t have a P.E. teacher because they don’t have a strong PTA. I drive by one every single day.

Tuatagaloa is on the board of a nonprofit dedicated to keeping programs in schools. It’s Heads Up San Rafael Public Education Foundation, and it’s been around for twenty years.

TUATAGALOA:  This year we went after the budget cuts that happened. So like the librarians were gone, the school buses were gone, transportation, counseling was gone.

By soliciting money from private corporations and local families, and by holding a big fundraiser called Andy’s Summerfest, which raised more than one hundred thousand dollars, Heads Up was able to provide music programs, library clerks and counseling at all of the district’s K-12 schools.

But Tuatagaloa says all that fundraising can cause parents to burnout.

TUATAGALOA: And this is communities all over. I talk to my friends in Walnut Creek, they’re doing the same thing. This is what you do now for the schools. I mean, we have serious budget issues.

Over in the entry to the gym, two women and an eighth grade girl are taping up more posters and strings of twinkling lights.

Elsa Hernandez is mother to eighth grader, Dajhan.

ELSA HERNANDEZ: You know, he’ll mention it to me, he’ll say, “Mom, we’re going to have a party are you going to volunteer?” And I’m like, “Sure, I’m going to volunteer.” He’ll look for me the day I volunteer and he comes and says hi and he looks happy.  He’s happy when I volunteer.

Pinning up some shiny paper on the wall, Hernandez says she lives in the Canals, a mostly Latino neighborhood in East San Rafael. She says many parents in her neighborhood work long hours and don’t take on as much responsibility at the school.

HERNANDEZ: When I see them like in the stores cause we’re all around and I say, “Do you know we’re having this and this event in the school.” They say, “No I didn’t know.” I say, “Maybe you should come,” and I invite them and I try but most of them are too busy or too tired from work or they don’t have transportation. It’s a lot of things involved. But I don’t think there’s enough involvement.

More than 55% of the students at Davidson are Latino, and Hernandez says their parents need to do more.

HERNANDEZ: I keep telling them, if you want something happening you have to come to the PTA meetings. We don’t have enough involvement. Sometimes I give up so I go, ah, they don’t want to come, forget it. And that’s not good.

With just a few minutes until the doors open to hundreds of kids, representatives of the Davidson Dad’s Club arrive to set up the barbecue outside the gym doors. Mark Kim, father of a seventh grader, is officially in charge of the grill.

MARK KIM: I’m here to barbecue the food with Mr. Nakamura, and Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Berenger. So we have 200 hamburgers and 100 hot dogs and we’re going to cook tonight.

A group of four dads got the club started when their children were in elementary school. When the kids moved up to middle school, the men brought the Dad’s club with them. Corey Bytof is a member of the unofficial, loosely organized club.

COREY BYTOF: It’s a way for dads to get involved without being part of the bureaucracy or the PTA or anything and just sort of get things done. They have meetings occasionally often over a beer and we can just kind of go and make our own decisions and do whatever we want. If we want to do it at our house and raise some money we can we just pour it into the school or PTA or whatever we need done and when there are things like this and they need help. They call up the dads and we try to get people to help.

MULLANE: And they put you out here with the barbecue.

BYTOF: Right.

Grill-master Kim sprays a stream of lighter fluid on the coals and throws on a match. A huge ball of black smoke rises in the sky. All the dads smile.

It’s just about 6:30 and the kids start making their way through the security check and into the gym. A bank of mothers wait at two tables to check off names and collect the $5 admission fee.

Inside the gym, the overhead lights have been turned off. The lamps set up by Dallara give off just enough light to see everything going on. It’s party time.

A group of girls run from one side of the gym to the other, dancing, skipping, all beautifully alive. Some boys jump and squirm in the middle of the floor. Parents stand and stare at their kids, as if they’re seeing them all grown up for the first time. But not quite. After all, they’re only just coming of age.

In San Rafael, I’m Nancy Mullane for Crosscurrents.

This story originally aired March 17, 2010.