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Latino activist returns to help children succeed

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Sometimes you need to move away to make a difference in your own community.

Longtime activist and mediator Antonio Ramirez spent 18 years helping fellow Latinos feel welcome in Frederick. He founded Nuestra Casa Del Pueblo (Our People’s House), an organization to promote communication and understanding about Latino issues in Frederick.

Two years ago, Ramirez, 47, headed to San Francisco, where he soaked up innovative approaches to help disadvantaged families, regardless of ethnicity.

‘‘I have an obligation as an immigrant to do my part in this country,” the Mexican native said. ‘‘I can’t just sit back and enjoy it.”

Back in Frederick, Ramirez is eager to implement a version of First Five, a California-based school readiness initiative that targets newborns through 5-year-olds and their parents.

The program focuses on the importance of the first five years of a child’s life, a time when the brain develops most dramatically, according to a California Children and Families Commission newsletter.

He is shopping the program around to Head Start personnel in Frederick, but said he will institute it himself if he cannot partner with another agency, an indication of his passion for the concept of First Five.

Of the 262 low-income families enrolled in Frederick’s Head Start program, about 35 percent of them are Latino, according to Family Advocate Doris Delsalto. Though First Five and Head Start share similar goals, Head Start is for 3- to 5-year-olds.

First Five, Ramirez said, grew out of statistics in the 1980s on the prevalence of drug and alcohol abuse and promiscuity among increasingly younger children of low-income families. The problem is not about immigrants, but about poverty. Poverty, he said, puts people in a ‘‘kind of quarantine,” where they never travel out of their own circles or seek resources to help them help their families.

‘‘The early-prevention program teaches parents how to set limits with their kids, and educates them on the rules, rights and obligations they have as parents,” Ramirez said.

Discipline is key at an early age, an age where values are imprinted and the stage is set for later academic and personal success or failure, he said.

Head Start works with parents, too, Delsalto said, by teaching them the importance of being involved in their child’s education. First Five’s emphasis on working with the entire family would fit in well with Head Start’s goals, she said.

Ramirez worked as a First Five trainer in San Francisco, where the emphasis is on low-income minorities as a group, not distinct ethnic groups. He has access to materials used in the First Five training workshops, including videotapes and other teaching tools.

A crucial element, however, is not the curriculum itself, but the ability of the trainer to build trust.

Working with minority, low-income families, Ramirez said, requires sensitivity and an ability to reach them.

‘‘You have to be very open, speak the same language and not buy into stereotypes,” he said.

Ramirez acknowledges that there are groups in Frederick geared to helping disadvantaged minorities, but said that some of the providers do not have any idea how to work with diverse populations.

Lydia Espinoza-Crafton, who previously worked on Latino issues with Ramirez in Frederick, supports the idea. A member of Frederick County’s mediation center, CALM, Espinoza-Crafton said she believes that much needs to be done to curb the rate of dropouts among Latinos and blacks. Work on that issue, she said, has to start early.

Parents must be empowered to become advocates for their children once they start school, according to Espinoza-Crafton. Many low-income families do not know how to be part of their children’s school life, or trust that teachers know more than they do about educating their children, Espinoza-Crafton said.