The Power of Parent Engagement: One Family’s Journey
Education
Posted November 2015
Often, big social movements start with just one worried parent. That’s the case in Redwood City, CA., just south of San Francisco, where two new charter schools just opened.
In Redwood City, that worried parent was Maritza Leal, a mother of three who, along with her husband, played a major role in bringing a Rocketship charter school to Redwood city, CA.
Redwood City is a community tucked into Silicon Valley that once was a working class suburb of San Francisco. Today, some of the town still reveals that history, with car repair shops and former assembly plants. In recent years, however, it has transformed quickly in two ways: an infusion of well-off tech employees looking for cheaper housing to upgrade and a large Hispanic community that performs the must-do chores for the wealthy: cleaning houses, busing tables, hanging drywall.
Leal, a full-time housekeeper for a family in a nearby wealthy suburb, fits into that latter group. There’s an easy way to separate the two groups: Whose kids get admitted to North Star Academy, Redwood City’s test-based magnet school for gifted children. Quick answer: Not many from Leal’s Hispanic neighborhood.
The school options for most Hispanics are some of the lowest performing elementary schools in the region for English language learners. And the Hispanic parents know it.
So when Leal sensed that things weren’t going well for her oldest daughter, then second grader Daniela (the teacher, Leal said, assured her that her daughter was doing just fine) she didn’t believe the teacher and sought other options. Eventually, she settled on a Rocketship charter school in San Jose.
The challenge: That’s a 100-mile round-trip commute through some of the toughest traffic in the country. Leal’s husband, Enrique Esparza, did most of the driving, eventually organizing a small car pool after buying a used Dodge van from a church. That commute, and that van, gained fame in a documentary made for the California Charter Schools Association.
The eventual answer for Leal and Esparza: Convince Rocketship to open a school in Redwood City.
“At the time Redwood City was not on our map,” says Rocketship co-founder Preston Smith. His counsel: Gather 300 names and get back to us. Privately, Smith assumed it would go nowhere.
But Leal, Esparza and another key Redwood City parent turned out to be natural-born canvassers. With guidance from Jose Arenas, a community organizer for Innovate Public Schools, they soon organized an “action” that led to 425 parents crammed into a community center – an event witnessed by school board members and other local officials. One reason the signature gathering was so easy: The parents wanted a school with standards as high as North Star, and they suspected Redwood City wasn’t likely to deliver for their kids.
By the time actual vote came on both a Rocketship and KIPP school the Redwood City board approved it unanimously. They had never before witnessed a community uprising like this, and weren’t about to stand in the way. You don’t say no to Maritza, Enrique and 450 of their friends and neighbors.
Thus was born Redwood City Prep, a school that opened in the fall of 2015.
Leading a movement, speaking before hundreds, might have seemed a stretch for a housekeeper whose family immigrated to Redwood City from El Salvador in 1998. But she says she never nervous. Years of singing in a choir, including solos, prepared her.
“I have the ability to talk to others in public. I think that’s a grace given from God, so I’m not afraid to talk, especially when I’m targeting a problem like this.”
As for the van? They still have it, with 200,000 miles on it. Only they don’t have to drive as much.
Richard Whitmire is the author of several education books, including 2014’s On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope.
What's Next?
- Learn how Innovate Public Schools is helping parents in the Bay Area push for better schools.