Shely Meraz remembers the parent-teacher conference like it was yesterday.
“What’s going on with David?” the teacher asked. At first, Meraz thought something must be wrong with her son.
But then his fourth grade teacher showed her a graph charting David’s progress. During that school year alone, his reading skills had raced forward two grade levels. He was completely caught up.
Meraz smiled and quickly realized what was going on. “It’s because now I’m involved,” she said.
Meraz, who moved to Lafayette from Mexico in high school, credits ELPASO for her son’s success. The training, knowledge and resources she received to help her work with her youngest child had a halo effect on her eldest.
ELPASO – short for Engaged Latino Parents Advancing Student Outcomes – is a program with a vision that Latino families will form a community movement in which their children have the same opportunities to succeed as all other children.
The Community Foundation Boulder County in 2014 launched ELPASO in deep consultation with hundreds of Latino parents. ELPASO became an independent, Latino-run, nonprofit organization in July 2017.
Meraz is one of nearly 100 Latino parent leaders who graduated from the program in its first three years. Like all the leaders, Shely was recruited by one of ELPASO’s four School Readiness Coordinators.
Each day in Lafayette, Longmont and Boulder, the coordinators knock on doors in low-income, Latino neighborhoods, presenting parents with facts about childhood development and the achievement gap. They provide information about community resources available to Latino parents and refer them to community social programs that meet their needs.
All of the coordinators moved to Boulder County from Mexico and are raising their children in Boulder County. Their conversations are entirely in Spanish. They establish trust quickly with parents, and they are smart about how they do this.
Lafayette School Readiness Coordinator Veronica Sangabriel met Meraz by telling her son, who was playing in the yard outside his house, that she had free children’s books. She asked him to go get his mom so she could ask if it was OK to give him one.
After 10 minutes of talking, Meraz invited Sangabriel inside. “I really would like to help the community one day, but I don’t know how,” Meraz told her.
Sangabriel invited her to become an ELPASO leader. Over the course of the next school year, Meraz and the other leaders gained skills, knowledge and critical information about the importance of early childhood education. They immediately put their skills to use by sharing information learned in the classroom with other community members, during house meetings, or “cafecitos.”
The combination of door-to-door visits and cafecitos helped ELPASO reach more than 3,000 Latino parents of young children in the program’s first three years.
Richard Garcia, founding Executive Director of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, has been working to improve Latino parent engagement for 40 years. He helped create ELPASO, which he said he believes is a partial answer to closing the achievement gap.
“I’m excited about ELPASO because it’s going to provide the momentum we need,” he said. “I’m hoping someday we’ll have that voice for the Latino kids that need those services the most.”
Like many of the ELPASO alumni parent leaders, Meraz is committed to doing her part. Since graduating, she has become an assistant teacher at Head Start, which recently sent her and her 2½ year-old son to Washington D.C., to advocate for quality, affordable childcare.
“My community really needs Hispanic people from Mexico, who know what they’re going through,” she said. “They just need a voice that really relates to them.”
For more information about ELPASO, or to donate, visit
by Chris Barge
