Parents Hope to Play Key Role in Luther Burbank's Reconstitution

As prepares for a district mandated overhaul, parents said the drastic academic reboot can only succeed if they play an integral role in the process.

Through the school's recently mandated , brought on by habitually lagging test scores in math and English, all of Luther Burbank’s teachers have been required to reapply for their jobs.

Additionally, modern gymnasium and classroom facilities are scheduled to open at the start of the coming school year.

However, parents said neither new facilities nor a new teaching staff would turn the tide at the historically under-achieving school if parents didn’t play a major role in the transformation.

 “Parent involvement will be 100 percent necessary in order to achieve the desired outcomes,” parent Maria Carmen Sanchez told Highland Park-Mount Washington Patch through a translator.

However, Sanchez said that due to four years of struggling for changes at the school with little results, some parents have become disillusioned.

“The reason is that they’ve lost hope,” Sanchez said. “This has been a four-year struggle. At one point we had approximately 100 parents, they were more involved. Over the years, due to the lack of support [from the administration] and that lack of leadership, the numbers have dwindled. Now we feel like we have to convince the parents that this is actually an attainable goal.”

Burbank has been under LAUSD mandated program improvement for more than five years after not reaching benchmarks in math and English laid out by California under the national No Child Left Behind Act.

Under the act, states are required to measure student achievement through an approved standardized test. In California, the California Standards Test (CST) is used to track student proficiency.

According to Shannon Corbett, LAUSD district 4 director of school services, students at Luther Burbank have for years lagged behind their peers across the state on the CST.

"States set a benchmark percentage for the number of students showing proficiency in math. The proficiency benchmark is 58 percent, Burbank is at 30.5 percent," Corbett said. "For English Language Arts, the proficiency benchmark is 58.8 percent. Burbank is at 33.3 percent."

LAUSD board member Yolie Flores Aguilar, who will be stepping down from the board in June, agreed that a financial commitment to increasing parent engagement would be critical to improving academic achievement at Burbank.

 “We talk about it all the time, but we don’t actually invest in helping parents become centrally involved in their children’s education,” Aguilar said.

Aguilar, who was in attendance at Burbank on Wednesday night for an informal community meeting, said she will be using the remaining balance of her discretionary education bond funds to invest in parent centers at five LAUSD schools, including Burbank.

“We know in this district that we have many parents who are not familiar with the educational system, who may not speak the language, who may not feel comfortable being involved and engaged because of their status,” Aguilar said. “But if we were to support them, we know that they would become more involved. If there are barriers for parents to participate, we want to help them overcome them.”

 Sanchez said that with the impending reconstitution and promises of increased investment in parent engagement from Aguilar, she is optimistic about Burbank’s future for the first time in a long time.

“For the fist time in about four years we feel like we are on the edge of being where we want to be,” she said.