CAPITAL JOURNAL : A ‘Learning Opportunity’ for Governor

On his first working day as governor, Pete Wilson visited a local elementary school Tuesday and was promptly introduced to one of California’s major educational problems: Rapidly increasing numbers of non-English-speaking students who need more help than the state and federal governments have been able to provide.

Wilson’s visit to Marian Anderson Elementary School, near low-income neighborhoods on the east side of Sacramento, was billed as a “photo opportunity”--good pictures of the governor visiting a computer lab and talking to youngsters from several racial groups.

A dozen television crews, some from Los Angeles and San Diego, were on hand when the governor sat down at a computer terminal to find out what Kae Youn Saelee, a second-grader whose family comes from the mountains of Laos, was learning.

It turned out to be not much. The Hmong youngster speaks no English and was unable to relate the mouse on his computer screen with the word mouse, nor was he able to tell the governor what he was doing.

The student stared at Wilson and Wilson stared at him for a couple of minutes before the governor was moved along to Latino and black children who could speak English.

The incident said much about Wilson’s dilemma. He wants to shift the state’s spending priorities from remedial programs to prevention. In the case of Kae and many others, it may be too late for prevention and remedial programs are clearly needed.

The point was underscored by Rosemary O’Grady, who runs the computer lab. The IBM computers are nice and they are helpful to pupils who have some English language skills, she said. But they are of little value to children such as Kae, she told a reporter. There are many such children at Anderson school, as there are throughout California.

Last year, 1 in 4 California pupils in kindergarten through third grade--397,586--were designated “limited English proficient,” an increase from 1 in 5 the year before.

Educators agree that such children need teachers who either speak their native languages or who are skilled in offering English as a second language. They need small-group instruction in English while they are studying other subjects in their native language.

At Anderson school, none of the teachers can speak Mien or Hmong--spoken by almost one-third of the school’s 610 pupils. Only one parent who speaks either language is employed as a teacher’s aide.

“I am supposed to deliver both computer skills and language skills to the same child and that’s fine,” O’Grady said, “but I can’t do it and the teachers at this school can’t do it without more training in English as a second language. Until we get it, 200 or more children at this school are not receiving the services they need.”

O’Grady said she told Wilson about some of the problems but “the visit was very orchestrated and there wasn’t much time.”

The rest of Wilson’s hourlong stay at the school was more successful.

He stopped at the school’s children’s center, where more than 90 youngsters, ages 3 to 12, from low-income families are cared for from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m. He chatted with several young boys who told the governor that they wanted to be professional football players when they grow up.

Then, Wilson signed an executive order establishing the new Cabinet-level position of Secretary of Child Development and Education. The job will be filled by Maureen DiMarco, who accompanied Wilson to the school.

He said DiMarco was “an outstanding educator and an outstanding advocate for children,” whose job will be “to implement much of what was outlined in yesterday’s inaugural message.”

In that message, and again Tuesday, Wilson stressed the need for “preventive” and not “remedial” programs.

“We can no longer afford to engage in the kind of remedial effort that carries with it tremendous fiscal costs, but more importantly, unacceptably high human costs,” he said.

To make money available for new preventive programs, “it will inevitably mean we will have to make cuts” in some existing health, education and welfare expenditures, the governor said.

Wilson said too many teachers are “diverted from the task of teaching to be parents, social workers, even in some cases, cops.”

By combining the state’s educational programs with such services to children as health, mental health and welfare--all offered at the school site instead of in a dozen different places--Wilson hopes to make these programs more effective and more cost-efficient.

DiMarco said much of the cost might be picked up by the federal government, which has increased spending for children’s services of all kinds by a whopping 14% in the current budget year.

“There’s money out there and we are going to go get our share of it,” she said in an interview.

After about an hour, Wilson departed from the school, leaving behind a greatly relieved principal, Guadalupe B. Lewis, who had returned from Christmas vacation Sunday night to be told that the state’s new governor would be paying her a visit in two days.

Lewis thought the visit was successful. “The children were so verbal, I was so pleased,” she said.

But Lewis, and educators such as her across the state, must return to the difficult task of teaching basic skills to the children from the Laotian mountain tribes and other children who are starting from very far back.

They hope that in Wilson and DiMarco they have found two helpful and effective allies.