Pasadena Parent Association Advocating for Equitable Education (Asociación de Padres de Pasadena Luchando por la Educación) otherwise known as A.P.P.L.E is a project that promotes training, organizing, and participation from the parents
who have children within the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD.)

APPLE'S purpose is to reach an equitable and quality education for all children without distinction of race, gender, socio-economic or legal status, religion or national origin. The immigrant community represents 54% of all enrolled students within the schools, and together with the African-American community represent 80% of all students. The majority of the students come from low income families and have one of the highest drop out rates, abandonment, and low school performance in the country. The inequality and treatment in education offered to the students from immigrant families requires an active and constant participation by the parents and students to reform the whole educational system. Our goal is to create a parents movement around school reform and our objective is equality and quality education.

What We Do
- With the support of PUSD, we are developing a wide training project which combines subjects from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE), and from our own works.
- As APPLE we have develop subjects as “Understanding multicultural diversity” and “conflict resolution.” As part of this leadership and school reform project, parents can be part of the decisions made to benefit all students. We have managed to involve parents in the school committees in 9 out of 32 schools that make up PUSD.
- We initiated a training program for parents as educators thus they can reproduce and develop our model of popular education around public education. We hope to bring our work to 50% of all PUSD's schools in the 2006-2007 school year.