Graduation Night For Visitacion Valley Parents
June 1, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Ten Chinese American parents graduated last Friday from the Visitacion Valley Parents Association’s Leadership Training, a project nurtured by Chinese for Affirmative Action/Center for Asian American Advocacy to help limited English-speaking parents lead and fight for their public school interests.
The program, now in its third year, has graduated 27 parents who mostly reside in Visitacion Valley, a neighborhood in the southeast corner of San Francisco. Some parents applied their leadership skills last year by sending 500 letters to successfully urge Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign Assemblywoman Wilma Chan’s (D-Oakland) bill providing more accountability in the translation of school documents for parents
At the graduation in Visitacion Valley Community Center, Cindy Choy of the leadership team said that “unity is power” as she likened the graduates and other parents to “many grains of sand [who] can create a tower.”
Two graduates spoke during the ceremony, primarily conducted in Cantonese, about their own experiences.
“With my limited English,” said graduate Winnie Zhou in Cantonese. “I was too timid to raise these issues … Today, I can speak up to the government to make them change.”
During Zhou’s training, she came to appreciate the process of the California legislature to support Chan’s bill. Now she’s pushing for passage of Assemblyman Jose Solorio’s AB 590, a bill providing matching grants for oral interpreters in school districts.
Graduate and Hong Kong immigrant Vivian Li spoke about supporting the interests of her daughter, born in an “unbearable experience” by Caesarian section without anesthesia.
She joined and participated in lectures by the Visitacion Valley Parents Association.
“In order to succeed in American society, I have to take the initiative,” said Li, who planned to apply her leadership skills “in my life going forward.”
According to CAA’s Christina Wong, the leadership training is a three month program of six Friday night classes for the working parents. Dinner and child care are provided and classmates are a mutually “supporting network.”
The classes have taught relationship building, public speaking, how to facilitate meetings, outreach and testifying. Parents today know how to access school district services. For a November report on language barriers in the school district, they surveyed the needs of 125 Visitacion Valley parents whose children were likely to be among the 57 percent of 58,000 S.F. public school students needing some form of English assistance.
“They shared the results of the survey with the [school district] committee,” said Wong.
Although this year’s class of ten was smaller than the last year’s 17, said Wong, “It’s because we have the parents training this new group.” As a result, the program continuously recruits new parents and generates more new leaders on its own.
School board vice president Norman Yee, who gave his keynote remarks in Cantonese and English, shared his own emergence as a leader as a grade school teacher in the Mission. A bilingual class of students mostly from Chinatown was expected at parent-teacher conference, “No Chinese parents showed up,” he said. “It implied that parents don’t care about their kid’s education.”
However, when he set up a meeting in Chinatown, “Every parent of every single student in Chinatown showed up,” he said. “That experience helped me to help parents fight for their rights.”
“It’s another example of what parents can do when they ask for things,” said Yee. Silence is misperceived by others, said Yee. “If [school leaders] don’t hear anything, then everything’s okay… But if you don’t ask, you won’t get anything.”
“You could ask, ask, ask,” he exhorted.
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