Cover Story: Another chance -- The Sequoia Adult School opens a door of opportunity for those left behind because of bad luck or bad choices Cover Story: Another chance -- The Sequoia Adult School opens a door of opportunity for those left behind because of bad luck or bad choices (January 26, 2005)

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

In 1951, when Antonio Garcia was an 8-year-old boy in Zazatecas, Mexico, school was not in the cards for him; he was needed to help put food on the table. So Antonio went to work picking fruits and vegetables from 6 in the morning to 8 at night, earning 25 cents a day. There was never enough to eat.

The schooling he did acquire was on his own initiative at the end of the workday. He learned the alphabet and how to write his name, but that was about it.

"My childhood was very hard. It was extreme poverty. Now we live in poverty, but then it was extreme," says Mr. Garcia, now 61, a U.S. citizen, and living with his wife in East Palo Alto. "I don't wish this to anyone, what happened to me."

Mr. Garcia is on disability retirement with a hernia and several other health problems. With a lifetime of illiteracy and tough 12-hour days in restaurant back rooms behind him, he is making up for lost time by learning to read and write in English at the Sequoia Adult School on Middlefield Road near Redwood City. He spoke with the Almanac through an interpreter.

His wife, who graduated from high school, takes adult classes, too. "We're old, but here we are in school," Mr. Garcia says, smiling. "They say it's never too late, and now I'm trying very hard."
Students, all the same

It's easy to think of the Sequoia Union High School District as home to 7,500 to 8,000 high school students: the cliques and crowds and coteries of teenagers who stream into school in the morning and out again in the afternoon.

But that's only half the story. Under the district's other wing is the Sequoia Adult School, also with an enrollment of about 8,000 students, many of whom were born south of the border.

Adults who missed out on educational opportunities come to the school day and night to learn to communicate in English, to earn general equivalency diplomas (GED), to better understand their role as parents of students, and to prepare for the U.S. citizenship exam.

The classes are free, as is the day-care, paid for with grants and about $2.5 million that the Sequoia district receives annually from the state. While local property tax revenues fund much of the district's operating budget, the adult school receives none of that money.

The school -- 84 years old this month -- employs 140 part-time teachers and is overseen by the district's five-member Board of Trustees . "It's a gem in the rough," says trustee Don Gibson. "It has a lot of potential."

With the district now facing federal sanctions aimed at raising the academic performance of underachieving students, experienced adult school teachers may help to more effectively educate parents. "It's going to help those kids do better," says Mr. Gibson.

Classes are held at the Middlefield Road location and 34 other locations in southern San Mateo County, including senior centers, churches, and spaces made available by recreation departments and nonprofit partners such as Opportunities Industrialization Center West (OICW) in Menlo Park.

Families of migrant farm workers and fishermen are treated as special cases, as their constant mobility can impose particular hardships. The school offers those families a range of services, including pre-school, summer school, parent training, and independent study for high-school and youthful adult students.

"It's like an extra counselor that's keeping an eye on students to make sure they graduate," says the school's migrant-community liaison Araceli Castellanos, who at age 7 came to the United States from Mexico with her farm-worker parents. She's an alumnus of Sequoia High School.

The adult school also helps disabled adults move toward self-reliance, offers vocational education classes at OICW, holds GED classes in the county jail, and helps jail inmates with job-search, communication, and computer skills.

While the school's focus is on non-native students and others facing cultural obstacles, it also offers fee-based personal enrichment classes. Recent offerings include conversational foreign languages, softball for seniors, wine-tasting, salsa dancing, memoir writing and yoga.
Capital improvements ahead

At the adult school's crowded two-story headquarters at 3247 Middlefield Road -- in the center of the Hispanic community -- the available classes focus on ESL, GED and basic reading, writing and math.

This building is in line for an upgrade. In November, voters approved Measure H, a $70 million bond measure for the high school district that included $9 million to either rebuild the adult school's headquarters or remodel them and construct a second building, perhaps in East Palo Alto.

First in line for the bond funds are the four comprehensive high schools in the Sequoia district, says Don Gielow, who oversees the district's capital improvements. Decisions on improving the adult school facilities are two to three years away, he says.

Asked about the importance of Measure H money, Pat Torres-Cocconi -- the director and head of the school -- says that her principal concern is how the adult school can serve the entire district without forgetting those most in need of its services.
Student stories

Reyna, 32, of Redwood City is a housewife from Mexico City and the mother of two children. She's studying English at the adult school and hopes to earn enough here so she and her family can move back to Mexico and buy a house for 150,000 pesos, or $15,000.

With her English-language skills, she says, she hopes to land a job as an interpreter and translator at an airport. She practices her English at school and with her boss at the pizzeria where she works, but says she misses Mexico City, where the rents are lower and the life isn't so hectic.

"It's very difficult here," says Reyna through an interpreter. "I can't spend too much time with my family because I have to spend time working and working and working."

Sylvia Hawkins, 32 and a single mother of two, says she returned to Redwood City from her mother's place in Sacramento when rents became affordable after the dot-com bust. Ms. Hawkins suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and receives Social Security disability payments.

At the adult school, she says she is working toward a GED. She once attended Menlo-Atherton High School but lacked the credits to graduate, in part, she says, because she and her friends skipped too many classes.

Ms. Hawkins says she hopes to go to college and on to a career helping sick people, using her experience with arthritis as a guide. "I could tell them how it is and that they can get through it," she says.

Attending college would make her a good role model as well. "I want to set that goal for my kids," says Ms. Hawkins. "I don't want them to end up in my situation."

Rosalba Ambriz, 57, grew up picking lemons and peppers in the state of Michoacan in Mexico. She says she had to leave school in the third grade because her parents could not afford the associated expenses, including a uniform. She never learned to read or write.

After 18 months of study at the Sequoia Adult School, she recently passed her U.S. citizenship test, which requires basic reading and writing skills and the intestinal fortitude to answer -- in English -- probing oral questions from a federal official.

Ms. Ambriz lives with her children in Redwood City and works at a convalescent home in Palo Alto, heating food for elderly, infirm patients. "Because I don't speak English, I don't make too much," she says through an interpreter. "If I knew English, I would work in a different section."

With her citizenship test now behind her, Ms. Ambriz says one important purpose for understanding English is to keep up with politics. Asked how she voted in the recent presidential election, Ms. Ambriz at first smiled and refused to say, but then gave it up: "I voted for the other one, so that we could stop the war."
INFORMATION

Offices for the Sequoia Adult School are located at 3247 Middlefield Road in unincorporated San Mateo County near Redwood City, with classes at 35 locations in southern San Mateo County. To learn more about course offerings, go to adultschool.seq.org or call 308-8866, extension 7942.

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