Last year, a girl in Melody Gonzalez’s class at Las Palmas Middle School, in the San Gabriel Valley, started sobbing in class one day.

Gonzales asked her what was wrong. The girl said her father had just been deported.

“I felt terrible. There was nothing I could say or do. So I just listened,” said Gonzalez, who’s been teaching seven years. “I just tried to be there for her. I think the listening helped — now she knows she can come to me."

Such supportive, personal relationships between teachers and students are one reason why Covina-Valley Unified, where Las Palmas is located, has such a high student success rate, especially for Latino students, teachers and administrators said. Latino students, who make up 75 percent of the district’s 12,000-student enrollment, have a 97 percent graduation rate, among the highest percentages of any ethnic group in any district in the state.

Read the source article about narrowing the Latino achievement gap by Carolyn Jones at edsource.org.