After-school support programs help students

This is the fourth in a five-part series on how the local school district is dealing with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Dora Rivera walks her daughter down the alley four days a week, past spray-painted parking signs and backyards tucked behind chain-link fences. The two arrive at a soup kitchen that faces a tiny liquor store. Rivera’s daughter, Denise, spends four hours a week at the kitchen getting help with English, math and homework. Once a week, she goes home with a bag of food.

Denise is one of 45 Pomona Elementary School students who spend their afternoons being tutored at the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen. The alley extends in a long, straight line from the Pomona playground to the kitchen’s side door. For students like Denise, who arrived from Mexico two years ago, it’s a journey of a different kind.

“I prefer to have my daughter come here because she learns more,” Rivera said. “When she came here, she had many prob- lems with learning English.”

With the Newport-Mesa Unified School District scrambling to bring its test scores up to federal standards, after-school locations like Someone Cares provide at-risk students with a few extra hours of support a day. The district has 1,939 children officially enrolled in after-school programs, and dozens more head in the afternoon to Save Our Youth, the Wilson Street Learning Center and other spots across town.

For the most part, they don’t go there to goof off. Only a few of the outside programs have contracts with Newport-Mesa, but they take the education standards just as seriously as the schools — at one, in fact, there’s money involved in making top grades.

Save Our Youth, a popular after-school destination for TeWinkle Middle School students, offers a scholarship program in which teens receive cash for A’s and B’s, then get all their earnings doubled after high school graduation. Executive director Trevor Murphy has participants sign contracts in which they promise to spend three hours a week studying at the center, undergo tutoring for any subjects they’re failing and keep a clean behavioral record at school.

“We definitely keep our thumbs on them,” Murphy said.

Around 50 Wilson students walk every day to the Wilson Street Learning Center, which is run by a church just a few blocks from the school. Students work with tutors on homework and class reading; if they run out of material, director Gina Gartner provides books and review worksheets. The only playtime she allows is Friday afternoon.

Newport-Mesa pays for some of the outside tutors. According to Program Improvement director Cheryl Galloway, the district put up more than $177,000 this year for Bright Futures, Carney International and other intervention specialists to visit students at home and at libraries. State law requires districts to purchase supplemental tutoring for schools that enter year two of the Program Improvement list; four schools in Newport-Mesa belong to that group.

Parents and students, though, get to choose which programs to take — and any number of factors may influence the decision. Luciana Puyo, the community facilitator at Pomona, said many parents opted to keep their children in the school’s afternoon program because they couldn’t take time off work to pick them up.

“Our parents work very hard,” Puyo said. “We have moms who sometimes have two jobs, and they have late evening hours.”

A number of program direc- tors said that, ironically, they can tell when California Stand- ards Tests roll around because students seem more relaxed.

“I think the majority of them, by the time I had them at the end of the day, were just glad they didn’t have homework,” Gartner said.