Earlier this month, with much fanfare, Principal Anna Corral ratcheted up the standards and expectations the school has of parents by opening and dedicating in their honor a Parent Room, with a day-care toddler room next door.
Newport-Mesa Unified Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard was on hand to speak a little Spanish to the parents, telling them about their crucial role in the educational development of their children. Board members Michael Collier, who is half Latino, and Judy Franco, and board President Karen Yelsey looked on with pride.
The juxtaposition in culture, albeit with a common interest in mind, couldn't have been more evident as dozens of Latino parents — some from Mexico, some from El Salvador — milled about in the ribbon cutting ceremony's aftermath.
They enjoyed tamales while they checked out the charts on the walls of the new Parent Room, where they can see how many hours they've volunteered in the past few weeks and compare them to weeks before and the parents alongside them.
Like school children to a certain extent, the parents were learning a little bit themselves, only on a different, more practical level.
"I want to give back to the community," said a Spanish-speaking Cortez, 33, a mother of three who moved to Costa Mesa a little more than a decade ago and whose husband works as a welder.
The cultural barriers are enormous, especially among people like Cortez, who speaks little English and hails from a part of Mexico that is heavily indigenous and is often not a part of mainstream Mexico. Where she comes from, Cortez said, attending school was a luxury among the well-to-do set, not the common folks who had to toil in the fields.
