PACOIMA : Shy Parent Turns Into School Leader

Ten years ago, the inside of a school was a place Isabel Martinez rarely ventured.

Even though she had five children under 10, the Pacoima resident said she knew little about how they were doing in school.

“I was very shy,” Martinez said. “I was one of those parents who dropped off my children and picked them up. I never found out who the teachers were or what the principal’s name was.”

Martinez isn’t shy anymore.

As community representative at the Telfair Avenue Elementary School parent center, Martinez is now a charismatic leader and role model for hundreds of parents in the Pacoima community where she lives.

She says an incident a decade ago led to her about-face.

One sweltering afternoon, Martinez said, she waited outside Pacoima Elementary School for her fourth-grade son to be dismissed from class. After a half an hour, she entered the school’s main office to find him, and to her dismay, realized that she knew neither his room number nor his teacher’s name.

“It hit me,” she said. “What if there was an emergency or something happened? I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do.”

After learning that her son was being held for detention in a misunderstanding with the teacher, Martinez vowed to get involved with her children’s education.

At first a volunteer classroom assistant, Martinez was hired by the district in 1990 to head the San Fernando Valley’s first federally funded parent center, headquartered in a spare classroom at Telfair school. Since then, more than two dozen other Valley schools have opened parent centers, and many look to Telfair as a model.

Parents can take classes at the center, which also serves as a base from which parents can volunteer to help in their students’ classrooms.

With eight children of her own and an intimate familiarity with the concerns of the people she serves, many look to Martinez as a model too.

Adela Moreno, who moved to Pacoima from Mexico five years ago, said she was afraid to speak in front of other people before meeting Martinez at the center.

“I feel like I woke up from a long sleep,” Moreno said through a translator at a recent parenting seminar. Moreno, who has three children, said Martinez inspired her to take English and literacy classes.

Martinez was born in Los Angeles, but moved to Mexico for about seven years to live with her grandmother when her mother was unable to care for her. Back in the United States, Martinez graduated from Belmont High School in Los Angeles and married when she was 19, after her mother convinced her that education was not a suitable pursuit for a young woman.

Now 41, with her youngest child almost 4 years old, Martinez is making plans to return to school.

She inspired Telfair parent Celia Torres to do the same.

“She showed us that we can help ourselves and our children,” said Torres, a mother of three, “that we are not dependent on anyone.”