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Reading turns woman’s life around

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With its nationally ranked universities and thriving science and engineering hubs, San Diego County is increasingly known as a place for smart people. More than 60 percent of those who move here now have college degrees, according to one recent study.

It’s also home to almost a half-million adults who are illiterate. They can’t help their kids with homework, can’t fill out job applications, can’t read this story.

Amelia Sandoval used to be one of them.

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Born in San Diego, she grew up in a household with a mother who was there in theory and a father who wasn’t there at all, she said. She was left alone sometimes with a TV and a cat as companions.

“School,” she said, “wasn’t really enforced.”

She stopped going in the fifth grade. Authorities put her in foster care, but she kept running away to hang out downtown. “I sold drugs, stole stuff and did whatever I wanted to do,” she said. “I had my own little crew.”

Stints in Juvenile Hall and child-protection receiving homes didn’t steer Sandoval from the course she was on. Being unable to read didn’t bother her much, either. “You don’t need to know how to read to pop open a car,” she said.

You don’t need to read to go to prison, either, which is where she wound up. She spent about five years behind state and federal bars for arson, smuggling unauthorized migrants across the border, aiding and abetting.

May 26, 2001, is when she was released, a date she’s memorized the way most people memorize their birthdays. As it turned out, it was something of a beginning for her, she said. On the bus leaving prison, she thought about how much better life was on the outside, right down to the simple things: the food, the water, the toilet paper.

“I’m not going back,” she told herself.

It’s a promise she’s kept in large part because she learned how to read, she said. Now 37 and living in Chula Vista, she’s working on her GED, taking computer classes and hoping for a career in information technology.

“Amelia came from a long way back,” said Jose Cruz, chief executive officer of the San Diego Council on Literacy, an umbrella organization that works with more than two dozen local reading-assistance groups and is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Sandoval once gave a talk to the council’s major donors and got a standing ovation.

“Talk about literacy changing lives,” Cruz said. “I think she found a strength she didn’t know she had. She found herself.”

A letter she couldn’t read

When people hear Sandoval’s story, they sometimes ask whether her parents had books in the home when she was growing up.

“Books?” she replies. “We were lucky if we had furniture.”

That’s not unusual among adults who are illiterate, said Valerie Hardie, administrator for READ/San Diego, the city library’s adult literacy program, which is where Sandoval went for help. “They grew up in homes where the parents didn’t read well, there were no books in the home, and they couldn’t model a life of learning,” she said.

Others had health issues as children that took them out of school, or had learning disabilities that went undiagnosed or were poorly understood.

As they get older, they either drop out or develop coping skills. Some cajole relatives and friends into helping them with homework and tests. One of the most famous literacy stories in San Diego involves John Corcoran, a North County businessman, who not only made his way through high school and college but became a high school world history teacher without knowing how to read.

“These folks may struggle with the printed word, but they are accomplished in other ways,” Hardie said. “They have strong memories. They’re savvy communicators.”

After Sandoval got out of prison, she found jobs that relied mostly on manual labor. She worked in a gas station, in a warehouse. “When you can’t read, you figure out what to do by watching everybody else,” she said. “You have to work three times as hard just to keep your head above water.”

When illiterate adults finally seek help with reading, it’s often because of some triggering event or need, Hardie said. They have a child they want to be able to read to. They want to get a driver’s license or their GED.

With Sandoval, it was because she lost her job at a grocery store and filed for unemployment. A letter about benefits came in the mail. She asked a friend for help, and when the friend asked why, Sandoval told her she couldn’t read. The friend laughed.

“I punched her,” Sandoval said.

Counselors at the San Diego Continuing Education Center suggested she go to READ/San Diego. The program uses volunteer tutors who are trained in phonics and typically meet with their learners twice a week for 1.5 hours each session.

“The biggest obstacle is the the incredible lack of confidence they have because they have failed so many different times,” said Maggi Hall, a retired insurance executive who is one of the tutors.

The tutoring sessions move at whatever speed the learner requires. “I can’t say there is an average time,” Hardie said, “because no two students are alike.”

No two students have the same reading dreams, either. Sandoval, whose babysitter as a child was a television set, loved watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoons. When she learned how to read, Ninja Turtle comic books were the first things she picked up.

Paying the price

The cost of illiteracy is well-documented.

Forty-three percent of adults at the lowest literacy level live in poverty. Seventy percent of welfare recipients are illiterate. People who can’t read prescriptions and other information make poor decisions that raise the cost of health care in the country by millions of dollars every year. More than 70 percent of state prison inmates can’t read above a fourth-grade level.

In San Diego, the Literacy Council estimates that the toll to the community — lost productivity, lost taxes because of unemployment, crime — is $8,000 for every adult who reads at a low level, more than $3 billion in all.

No wonder there’s a waiting list at READ/San Diego of about 120 people who need tutors.

Sandoval said she’s had help in her efforts to move away from being part of the statistics. At a Literacy Council fundraiser last week in Liberty Station, she ran into Marie Doerner, a professor and chair of disability support programs and services at San Diego Continuing Education. Doerner first met Sandoval in Continuing Ed classes and was moved by her story.

They’ve traveled together to conferences on the East Coast organized by WE LEARN, a Rhode Island-based group dedicated to “empowering women through literacy.” Sandoval’s essays about her struggles have been published in the group’s journal and won awards.

“I call Amy a tough nut,” Doerner said. “There were times she wanted to quit, but she kept at it.”

The first time they went to a conference, Doerner said, Sandoval was uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure she belonged. Then she met some of the other participants, people whose journeys mirrored hers.

She turned to Doerner and said, “I’m home.”

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