SCHOOL CHALLENGE : Influx of Non-English Speaking Students Strains System

During the past two years, the Latino population at San Diego High downtown has grown by more than 100 students annually, boosting Latino enrollment from 43% to 56% of the school’s total, with almost all of the gain a result of Mexican and Central American immigration.

More important for an already squeezed bilingual program, an increasing percentage of students are arriving at age 16 or older, often a month or more after the school semester begins, with few or no school records or transferable credits from their home country, and many barely literate in their native Spanish, let alone knowing nothing of English.

For these students--the majority of whom are here because of amnesty--the simultaneous demands of learning English, acclimating to American schools, and tackling 20 courses from algebra to biology, all in order to graduate after three years, prove increasingly unrealistic.

Dropout rates average more than 50%, with students leaving to find work full-time, to take care of younger siblings in very large families, or to return to Mexico--with discouragement over schooling a common denominator behind almost all of these decisions.

With the numbers also impacting other schools--Hoover High in mid-city and schools in the South Bay central are among them--administrators are grappling for innovative ways to try and keep more of these immigrants in the educational pipeline.

In the South Bay, the Sweetwater school district has set up a pilot “Newcomer’s Center” where newly arrived teen-agers can get a semester’s customized dose of intensive English, basic U.S. cultural and historical orientation, computer and study skills, and personal counseling--all before being turned loose into a regular high school bilingual program.

Educators from San Diego city schools hope this spring to propose course work for some immigrant students different from the required core curriculum which leads to graduation, around which the content of existing bilingual courses has been bent to try and meet.

In its larger context, the issue is forcing bilingual education to address academic preparation as well as language training at the junior- and senior-high level, since immigrant teen-agers are coming with a tremendous range of educational backgrounds.

Not all the immigrant students show up with little previous schooling. At Hoover High, for example, the number of Latino students has jumped from 20% to nearly 30% in two years, and many of the urbanized immigrants have good academic backgrounds. But they complain that they end up in low-level math and science because there are no higher-level academic courses to take while they are still learning English.

These students want more challenging bilingual courses and about 60 have organized the club Hispano Americano at Hoover to provide tutoring for each other, lobby for more academic recognition and gain better social acceptance at the school.

But for area educators, the most pressing problem for now centers on those with poor schooling.

“We want to try something for a kid who comes to our school, not literate in Spanish, not speaking any English, with only three or four years of schooling in their whole life and already 16,” Cathy Hopper, assistant superintendent for the San Diego Unified School District, said. “It’s unrealistic to think we’re going to get them to graduation before they drop out.”

Among several scenarios being explored by a special district committee which Hopper chairs are: intensive beginning reading instruction in both English and Spanish; survival skills for coping in American society; academic and/or vocational instruction in conjunction with the continuing education program at San Diego community colleges.

“They’re all options,” schools Supt. Tom Payzant said, who will bring a proposal from the committee to school trustees sometime in the spring. “We’ve got to start with a whole different set of assumptions about what we can do in one, or two or three years, for these students. Do we just try intensive language study and not do a broad curriculum at the outset?”

At San Diego High, in the heart of the city’s urban core where many immigrant families can afford rent, 87 of the 116 students enrolled this year for ESL 1 (the first-level English-as-a-second-language course) are 16 years or older, 68 brought no credits from other schools usable toward graduation, 84 had no school records at all, and only 31 were literate--able to read and write--in Spanish.

The school runs four two-hour blocks of ESL 1, ESL 2 and ESL 3, and tries to place as many students as possible into bilingual classes in math, biology, physics, world history and U.S. history. The number of such students is more than 300, about 20% of the school’s 1,460 total. A substantial number of the school’s remaining 500 Latino students have only recently transitioned out of ESL classes and are still struggling with some aspects of academic English.

“Instinctively, the immigrant kids say they want to learn the language, that they want to study-- estudiar-- but many really don’t know the implications, they aren’t really prepared for what is involved,” San Diego High counselor Carlos Romero said.

Joe Rudolph, an ESL instructor at Hoover High, said a big split occurs at the third ESL level, since ESL 1 and 2 gives students basic English for survival and general understanding while ESL 3 emphasizes the English skills--essay writing, plot outlines, etc.--needed in other academic classes.

The 20-some ESL 3 students in teacher Leslie Rolph’s second-period class are survivors, since more than half of their San Diego High peers who started out with them in ESL 1 already have disappeared from the school system. All in the class want to tough it out through the next year or two for a diploma. They reflect the many social and economic hopes and pressures that all teen-agers face during their high school careers, with one major difference: the challenge of language and culture acquisition.

“It’s often hard to study, since many of us have to work part-time,” one student said. “Some don’t like school or found it too hard, and many did not take school in Mexico. I had one year of high school, myself.”

Several credit parents or relatives for persevering. One student said he has stayed in school “only because when we moved to San Diego, my mother said that I am going to finish high school, that (she wanted) me to be successful. I do it for her,” he said, adding he is the only one of eight brothers who may achieve a diploma.

A third student said that other students “just don’t care” about school, or are frustrated because they cannot understand certain courses the school puts them in, or don’t receive enough encouragement from parents to study hard.

Romero said that the increasing numbers bring many demands on teachers and counselors. The classroom routine for learning English suffers especially when students continually arrive weeks or even months into a semester, Romero said.

“And with so many of them, the personal bond, the contact that allows us to help them cope with a new environment, becomes hard to make when we’re understaffed, and that impacts the school (in terms of) insubordination, crime, interruption of instructional programs,” Romero said.

In the Sweetwater district, the Bonita Vista High School pilot program in its first month has seven students taking what teacher Bonnie Funk calls “customized ESL 1.” New students with little or no English background are now referred from Sweetwater’s eight high schools and tested by aide Josefina Trevino in Spanish and English to see whether they could benefit from the intensive semester orientation. Participation is voluntary, but the two-teacher program expects to be at its 60-student capacity by sometime next fall.

Funk said the small size and presence of two aides allows for much individual teaching and counseling. She already has identified two or three students who could be placed into ESL 2 in the fall if they continue to progress as quickly as they have. Others are receiving what Funk terms a “literacy background” so that they will be successful when tackling ESL 1 in September, since both she and Trevino said “it really makes a difference” if a student is literate in his or her own language.

“We can switch gears depending on the individual student,” Funk said. All the students have instruction about U.S. history and geography woven into their three hours of English lessons. The other day, for example, the students tried putting together a puzzle of the United States.

In addition, teacher Carmen Plank gives the students orientation about American educational procedures, about help available for them in the community, about computers, and about study skills.

Funk has even set up a pen-pal program between the students and those in more advanced ESL classes at other Sweetwater schools to encourage peer modeling and self-esteem.

“We’re trying to deal with a problem recognized all over,” Funk said. The Bonita Vista pilot is modeled in part after San Francisco’s Newcomer High School, where new students with little or no English or schooling backgrounds spend a year before moving to a regular high-school ESL program.

“At least we hope to keep more of these students until they graduate,” Funk said.

San Diego’s Hopper said the district is looking not only at “jump-starting” high-school careers of immigrant students but working with the community colleges and other institutions as well on alternative studies so students will move on rather than drop out.

“I don’t think we’re doing a 17-year-old any good by putting him into algebra or history classes when he can’t read or write well in any language,” Hopper said. “I’d like to see us teaching reading skills, intensively, and then find out how to get them into a GED program, or into vocational courses at community colleges.”

The GED is the General Educational Development test, a series of exams available in English or Spanish, used for adults without diplomas to show they possess skills and concepts considered necessary for high school graduates and often required by employers.

Hopper is sensitive to arguments that the such programs would unfairly deprive the students of chances for a diploma. “My answer is that we better serve these students if we teach them English skills, survival skills, and allow them to enter society by pursuing further studies later through the community college, rather than see them become educational dropouts.”

Adds Tim Allen, the district’s second-language coordinator: “We’re saying that realistically, they can have access to the curriculum, but not, in many cases, by age 18 because we can’t fit them into a diploma program. There’s a huge tension between graduation standards and immigrant needs that we’ve got to face.”

Allen also said that Hoover High needs help in setting up bilingual academic classes to answer complaints of those students able to take more challenging math or science courses while still learning English.

George Mendivil, assistant dean for continuing education at the San Diego Community College center downtown, said there are many programs that students can take advantage of. Not only does the center run ESL and GED programs--day and night--but it also combines ESL instruction with classes at a vocational skills center.

“They can come to us, say having completed intermediate ESL, and can learn skills, such as auto body, steel fabrication . . . electronic test technician, machinist, auto mechanic, etc.”

But Mendivil said that continuing education is not set up to give close social counseling or orientation, which many of these students would need if they came directly to the program without spending some time at a high school. “We require more independence,” he said.

“I’d recommend that if they are 16 or 17, for example, they start ESL and the GED (at the high school), or maybe start vocational training, so by the time they are 18, they have a GED or at least can show they read or write, whether in Spanish or English, and then can go to City College, or the skills center, or find a full-time job.”

Mendivil said that the community colleges “need to do a better job of putting the word out” about what is available. “But at the same time, I don’t want to be in the position where the high schools feel we are trying to take their students.”

All the immigrant students, whether they come with a lot of education or very little-- want a chance to be considered as individuals.

“We want Americans to look at us as people,” Rafael Jaime, a Hoover junior who helped start the Hispano Americano club, said. The club has already sponsored social activities, including native dances at an ethnic festival day, will provide tutoring among members to encourage more students to stay in school and push their academics, and wants speakers to tell them about college and job opportunities.