School district struggling financially, staff wise to keep up with the influx of Latinos needing English as a second language course.

By STEVE MOCARSKY smocarsky@leader.net

“It’s a challenge as well as it is a gift. We have to meet the needs of all children … .”

Deb Carr Director of Curriculum

Hazleton Area School District’s budget for English as a second language students has increased by about 54 percent during the last three years.

And this fall, the number of ESL students will have more than doubled, according to projections provided by Director of Curriculum Deb Carr.

“It’s a challenge as well as it is a gift. We have to meet the needs of all children because we’re a public school system,” she said.

Before the 2002-2003 school year, when Hazleton Area initiated a comprehensive ESL program, the school district “used teachers during their free periods to fill in” where needed as ESL teachers.

Between the 2000-2001 and 2002-2003 school years, there were only three or four full-time ESL teachers on staff. The number of ESL teachers climbed to 11 in 2003-2004 and doubled by 2005-2006.

Carr said she requested four ESL teacher hires for this coming school year, but will most likely have to scrape by with just one hire because of budget limitations.

The ESL education budget, which includes teacher salaries and educational materials, jumped from $500 in 2000-2001 when teachers used “whatever leftover reading materials and math materials, things we could borrow from other classrooms” for ESL, to $897,604 last year.

While Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta has said that illegal immigrants are draining the resources of the city, area hospitals and schools, Carr said the school district has no way of knowing how many, if any, students are illegal immigrants or the children of illegal immigrants.

“That’s not the kind of question we’re allowed to ask,” she said.

Barletta raised the concerns after recent violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants. In response, city council passed an Illegal Immigration Relief Act ordinance that punishes landlords and businesses that rent to or employ illegal immigrants and makes English the city’s official language.

That move angered the Latino community, which grew in population from about 1,000 in 2000 to an estimated 9,000 this year, mostly because of the English language provision.

While a student’s inability to speak English doesn’t necessarily suggest that he or she is an illegal immigrant or a child of an illegal immigrant, unauthorized immigrants account for about 30 percent of the foreign-born population nationally, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan “fact tank” in Washington, D.C.

In addition to ESL student enrollments, which climbed from 96 in the 1997-1998 school year to a projected 950 this fall, Carr also provided enrollment data for minority students and migrant students for the past six school years.

A minority student is one whose race is other than Caucasian. A migrant student has a parent or guardian who works in a qualifying agricultural job and has changed their residence within the past three years.

Hazleton Area’s migrant student numbers climbed from 62 in 2000-2001 to 403 last school year. Minority student enrollment climbed from 505 to 2,335 in that same time span.

Sue Stetler, program manager for migrant education at the Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit, estimated that about 95 percent of Hazleton Area’s migrant students have a parent or guardian who works at Cargill Meat Solutions.

The child of any person who works in a job that involves the processing of raw plant or animal product and who has moved to a new geographic area would qualify for federal funding for educational programs for three years, she said.

Stetler also noted that migrant status has nothing to do with ethnicity.

For example, the children of a Caucasian man who moved to Hazleton from New York and took a meat processing job at Cargill would qualify for migrant student funding.

Carr said it’s also noteworthy that not all minority students or Latino students require special English language classes.

“Last week we tested approximately 130 Latino kids, and of those, about 30 were English language learners,” Carr said.

English language learner is another term for ESL student.

And in some Hazleton Area schools, the primary language of most of those schools’ ESL students varied between Polish, Albanian, Croatian, Russian, Persian/Farsi, Yugoslavian, and Hindi before 2003-2004, when the primary language of most Hazleton Area ESL students became and remained Spanish.

http://www.timesleader.com/mld/thetimes ... 156854.htm