Jorge Casas visited UCLA for the first time Friday, with his
wife Lourdes and his two young sons, Moradhi and Mozart, who are 18
months and three years old.
Along with 40 other parents and their young children, the Casas
family explored campus as part of an outreach program focused on
detailing the steps in the educational process and sponsored by
UCLA students and the Lennox School Readiness Center.
During the tour, the group stopped at major buildings on campus,
including Powell Library, which was the highlight of the day for
Casas’s son Mozart. Casas said the beautiful architecture and
the murals on the wall impressed him and his son.
S.P. Andrade-Banachowski, director of the Lennox School
Readiness Center, said seeing the campus firsthand was “a
dream come true” for most of the parents, who had never been
on a college campus. She believes it made the workshop experience
more personal, and allowed the parents to see that a university
education is open to everyone, including women and minorities.
“It was amazing to hear parents tell their kids,
“˜This is your future school,'” said Cesar
Morales, one of the two doctoral students in the Educational
Leadership Program who facilitated the outreach program.
The series, titled “Encouraging Educational
Excellence,” was designed to “de-mystify the entire
education pipeline,” Morales said.
Casas, who had never before set foot on a college campus, said
it was inspiring to see the university. Originally from
Guadalajara, Mexico, he came to the United States and settled in
the Los Angeles area. Although speaking in broken English and with
an accent, Casas is more fluent than most of the parents.
Tim Tatsui, one of the doctoral students who put on the program,
calls it a two-generation model, focusing on both the parents and
their children.
“It is like the Gerber version of AVID,” Tatsui
said. AVID, an academic support program, helps prepare grade and
high school students for college, while this program focuses on
younger children.
Casas said he always knew education was important and already
started saving for his children’s education before he was
married and had children.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with most of the parents in
the workshop, Andrade-Banachowski said. The workshops, which took
place at the Lennox center, emphasized planning ahead for the
future and taught parents how to set up savings accounts for their
children’s education.
Most of the parents at the workshop don’t think they have
the money to send their children to college, so they don’t
even dream about it, Andrade-Banachowski said.
She believes many parents in the program didn’t further
their own education because they didn’t understand the
educational process. Andrade-Banachowski said that after completing
programs at the center and learning about the opportunities
available, many parents decide to go back to school themselves,
including Casas, who plans to learn physical therapy.
Andrade-Banachowski said research shows that academic
preparedness must begin before children start kindergarten. She
said most children in Lennox, a predominantly Hispanic area, are
already academically behind other children when they start
school.
As part of the program, parents were asked to write down their
child’s dream career, and then craft an educational path for
them, encompassing every grade level from preschool to the
university.
Mozart Casas wants to be an astronaut in the future, and his
father is more than ready to help him stay on track and achieve his
goal.
“We have to show them the horizon,” Casas said.