Growing up in Lima, Peru, Amy Aparicio Clark would accompany her physician father to visit patients living in underserved areas.
“From the time I was 5, I would go with him to shanty towns on the outskirts of the city or to rural areas,” she says. “He felt an obligation to serve people who may never see a doctor otherwise. Those were formative experiences for me.”
As she entered fifth grade, Clark and her family moved to Connecticut, where she learned English while studying other subjects alongside her classmates. She began her career as a middle school Spanish teacher in Framingham, Massachusetts, before moving into education research and development.
Since joining EDC, Clark has led projects such as PALMS: Postsecondary Access for Latino Middle-Grades Students, which helps principals and teachers establish an environment that supports students’ pursuit of higher education.
Now Latino parents are her focus. She helped develop a bilingual version of the parent education/intervention program Saving Sex for Later, and she’s directing a new project called Salud y Exito (Health and Success), which will assist parents as they guide their children to make positive, healthy choices for their futures.
Your initial work at EDC focused on educators and school programs for Latino students. Now you’re focusing on parents and students making healthy choices. How do these strands of work connect?
The overarching goal in my work remains the same, but the target audience has shifted from the educators to the parents. Adolescence is a tough transition, both for the kids and for the parents. EDC is developing materials designed to model for Latino parents how to be assertive about monitoring their children’s activities and to clearly communicate their rules and values. We want parents to have positive interactions with their children. If students don’t make healthy choices early, they can be in for a rough time at school and later on. Reaching out to Latino parents is a critical step in helping students be successful in school and in life.
There is a lot of sincere goodwill in many schools. They want to reach out to Latino families, but in an era of never-ending budget cuts, there isn’t usually a lot of time or guidance on how to do that. So EDC saw an area of need where we could help school leaders ramp up their outreach. We’ve developed programs to help schools and families work more closely together, so the kids have what they need to succeed academically.
How can Latino parents have a positive influence?
Parents have a lot more influence over their pre-teen children than they may give themselves credit for. The peer pressure children face can be counterbalanced by clear messages from their parents, making kids less likely to have sex, get pregnant, and experiment with alcohol or drugs—risks that can impact school attendance and performance, and success later in life.
We’re in the process of developing a toolkit for agencies that are interested in adopting Saving Sex for Later for their community programs. We want to help them reach out to parents and grandparents who don’t know how to talk to their children about sex. Our audio CDs use storytelling and humor to model how parents can engage with their children on a topic that’s hard to talk about.
We’ve evaluated the effectiveness of these materials for African American families, and we’re in the process of evaluating the impact on Latino families. I’m excited about the cultural and language adaptation for a Spanish-speaking audience.
What’s gratifying about your work today?
Arriving in the United States as a fifth grader, I felt compelled to assimilate as much as possible. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized I was losing something important in the process. So I reclaimed my bilingualism and got a job teaching Spanish to sixth graders. Now at EDC, I love that I can use my language skills to help middle school students get more support from their teachers and their parents. It’s a small part to play, but it’s progress toward making inequities in our society a little less glaring.