Teachers must have nightmares that begin something like this:
You are standing at the front of a tiny, windowless classroom. It is warm and the air is stale. Before you are 22 plastic chairs, into which are crammed 33 people, roughly half of them under the age of 5. The rest are adults, and not all of them speak the same language. It is late afternoon, and this is the first of four classes you will teach today.
Marlene Moreno took in this scene at a federal nutrition center in East Los Angeles one recent Wednesday afternoon, smiled broadly and launched into her lesson with unbridled enthusiasm.
In two languages.
Moreno is an instructor with the nonprofit group Reading Is Fundamental of Southern California, which promotes literacy for preschool children and their families. The organization runs literacy programs and distributes books at more than 100 sites, most of them schools in low-income neighborhoods throughout the region.
It has also begun an innovative weekly program at a federal WIC center in East Los Angeles, the place where Moreno was teaching parents the fundamentals of creating a literate home. The program was partly funded this year by a $20,000 grant from the Los Angeles Times Family Fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which raises money for nonprofit groups serving disadvantaged children and teenagers in Los Angeles and Ventura counties and the Inland Empire.
WIC, the federal Women, Infants and Children program, provides food and nutritional advice to low-income pregnant women and small children. Clients typically come into WIC offices monthly to pick up checks and receive nutritional advice -- a process that usually involves waiting to see a program officer.
That provided an opportunity for Reading Is Fundamental, which collaborated with several other organizations, including Cal State L.A., to create literacy programs for families that were killing time at the East Los Angeles WIC center.
Every Wednesday afternoon, student volunteers from Cal State L.A. read stories to children at the center, then hand out books and lead arts and crafts activities. Once a month, Moreno, 30, a student at Cal State L.A. and the mother of a 7-year-old, conducts family literacy classes for young parents.
Response to the programs has been powerful, said Carol Henault, executive director of Reading Is Fundamental of Southern California. Many families time their visits to the WIC center around the Wednesday reading hour, and some come just for the literacy program.
