Getting Volunteers Involved : Schools: In line with Gov. Pete Wilson’s emphasis, educators learn strategies of turning to community for help in preventing students from failing.

Shortly after Rudy M. Castruita took over as superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District late in 1988, he got a letter from an Orange County Superior Court judge complaining about what a lousy job the schools were doing.

Castruita responded by asking Judge Jack Mandel for help--a plea that resulted in a large volunteer program of judges, attorneys and eventually other business and community members. Now each of about 450 volunteers spends at least six hours a year in the heavily minority, largely low-income district’s schools.

On Thursday, the project was one of the strategies Castruita shared with about 500 educators from throughout Southern California in a new state Department of Education effort to reach increasing numbers of students at risk of failing in school.

With little hope of money for new projects from the cash-short state, and Gov. Pete Wilson’s emphasis on volunteer programs, California’s education leaders are asking schools to suggest ways of making better use of what is already available.

“We’re not here today to say, ‘Here’s a new program, and here’s the money to fund it.’ That’s just not going to happen in these hard times,” Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said. He referred to the state’s projected $7-billion deficit and Wilson’s plan to cut education and other state-funded programs.

“I know there is a lot of frustration about that situation, but I think you’ll find that you can do a lot more than you think,” Honig said in urging educators to share their proven ideas and come up with new ones that can be used as models for school districts throughout the state.

The state project, dubbed Every Student Succeeds, is aimed at reaching students who are failing in school or likely to get into academic trouble. The effort comes at a time when the state is getting about 200,000 new schoolchildren every year, many of them from poor, immigrant or troubled families--the very kinds of youngsters that the public schools traditionally have had a hard time succeeding with.

The statistics illustrate the depth of the challenge.

Sixteen percent of California public school students were born in another nation, according to the state Department of Education. Almost one-fourth of all the state’s schoolchildren are from poor households; one in seven are not proficient in English.

Additionally, California has the second-highest teen-age pregnancy rate in the nation for 15-to 19-year-olds. One out of two California children will live in a single-parent household by age 18.

The state’s dropout rate averages about 20%, but education officials said it is more like 50% in some districts.

At the heart of the newly launched program are several principles--that every student can learn and that students who are having trouble should be given more time and help to learn the same basic curriculum that is expected of others instead of educators “dumbing down” what is required.

Other principles include taking a preventive approach to head off problems before a child gets too far behind, and building family and community links into each child’s educational program. Others place more emphasis on staff development and allowing time for adequate planning and evaluation of school programs.

Joining Honig were Eg Foglia of the California Teachers’ Assn. and Mary Sandlee of the California School Boards Assn., groups pledged to work with the state in finding better ways to educate all students.

Foglia said a “massive job of retraining teachers,” especially showing them ways to work effectively with the state’s increasingly diverse ethnic and cultural student population, is essential.

In Santa Ana, where about half of the 46,000 students speak little or no English, Castruita has shifted money from other parts of the district’s budget to provide paid workshops aimed at updating and broadening his teachers’ skills.

He has also enlisted support for the schools from local elected officials and persuaded area pediatricians and hospitals to help provide health services for students--some of whom had never before seen a doctor. He developed videos in three languages to teach parents how to interact with the schools and improve their children’s chances of success--projects which helped slash the district’s dropout rate from 50% to 11% in two years.

One of his favorite projects involves sending every fifth-grader, along with a parent, to tour the local community college. Each family gets a picture to commemorate the event with an inscription reading, “I am college-bound.”

“We want to plant that seed early that every student can succeed,” Castruita said.