Thread: Schools not keeping up with Hispanic population

Schools not keeping up with Hispanic population

As enrollment booms, educators strain to meet Spanish-speaking students' needs

EMILY S. ACHENBAUM

Staff Writer


Slide show | Hispanic students in the classroom

Hispanic children have surged into Charlotte region schools at a dramatic rate that has left schools scrambling to teach children in classrooms where a third or more speak Spanish.

Spanish-speaking students, most the American-born children of young immigrants who took root in the past decade, are entering elementary schools this year in numbers that surprised even schools that have traditionally served Hispanics.

State and district officials acknowledge they're struggling with the rapid increase but say the needs of Hispanic students must compete for limited resources. They say the enrollment boom's challenges must be met at the local level.

The change is happening in pockets around the Charlotte region -- towns and neighborhoods where Hispanics have moved in large numbers. Many schools say they are lagging, as teachers with minimal or no training in teaching non-English-speaking students juggle elementary school classes with high numbers of Spanish speakers.

More than 45 schools in the Charlotte region now have a Hispanic enrollment of 20 percent or more -- with some as high as 50 percent. Even five years ago many of these schools had Hispanic populations well below 20 percent, if they had any Hispanic students at all. And more Hispanic children entered kindergarten in North Carolina this year than any other year: 12,407, nearly a 13 percent increase over last year's record 11,000.

A standard statewide curriculum for English as a Second Language students went into effect only this year, passed by a state legislature under federal pressure to do so.

There are no state guidelines on how many students an ESL teacher should have, meaning some are responsible for monitoring the progress of 50 children. Only two people at the state level are assigned to watch over the education of ESL students. A third is being hired.

But state officials say the state's education structure emphasizes local control, and that accountability -- and its challenges -- rests squarely in the hands of individual districts. They also say it's not fair to put the needs of one student group above another.

One expert on the state's population acknowledges the increase was rapid but said the schools should have been more prepared. With thousands of young adults immigrating in the 1990s, said UNC Chapel Hill professor Jim Johnson, director of the university's Urban Investment Strategies Center, the arrival of their children in kindergarten was predictable.

But education officials say the growth has come so fast schools can only react.

"The schoolhouse door has very little energy and resources for future planning," said state Associate Superintendent Elsie Leak, who oversees curriculum. "If they had had slow growth, I think they would have been able to manage it. Explosive growth ... they're playing catch-up."

Latino advocates say schools need to make changes, and fast.

"We have a major problem on our hands," said Andrea Bazan-Manson, executive director of El Pueblo Inc., a nonprofit, Raleigh-based Latino advocacy organization. "We have wonderful teachers, but we're not doing right for the kids."

District leaders in charge of ESL agree that classroom teachers need help in designing lesson plans that will be effective for students laboring to grasp the language.

Training the teachers

In Hickory, a city of 39,000 people 60 miles northwest of Charlotte, educators like Longview Elementary Principal John Black are grappling with the change.Longview's Hispanic population surged to 19 percent in 2000, compared with 2 percent in 1996. That was an increase from seven Hispanic children in 1996 to 67 at the 350-student school.

"It took awhile for it to sink in," Black said, "that the population shift wasn't a fluke."

Teachers couldn't communicate with students, much less parents, and school fundraising took a nose dive. Dubious parents weren't sure what to make of the school's request that they sell Hershey's chocolate bars and give the school the money earned, Black said. The school struggled to cope.

"Five and six years ago, there weren't many (N.C.) school systems that had a history of long-standing Hispanic populations that we could turn to. Basically, it's been on our own," Black said.

The school is now 26 percent Hispanic. Teachers have responded by trying to teach each other Spanish and are attending community college language classes. The district has hired translators for PTA meetings.

But challenges are increasing. Longview Elementary's 64-student kindergarten class is 50 percent Hispanic this year.

"Kindergarten classes that are 40 and 50 percent Spanish-speaking -- the teacher needs extra guidance and training," said El Pueblo's Bazan-Manson. "Kids are getting shortchanged, and teachers are getting shortchanged. I think there's frustration all around."

Timothy Sims, an ESL coordinator for Hickory City Schools, agrees training is lacking.

"We need more training for classroom teachers to work with the kids," Sims said. "Most of our teachers want to do that. It's getting the training out there, and quickly. We're frantically trying to catch up."

But educators say Spanish-speaking or ESL-licensed teachers are scarce, and most classroom teachers need more help.

For one thing, busy teachers "aren't sure how to modify their lessons" so children learning English can follow along, said Debra Reed, ESL district coordinator for Union County schools.

"I don't think colleges are preparing them to work with ESL children very well," Reed said. "They come in knowing nothing about ESL."

ESL teachers typically spend 45 minutes two or three times a week teaching a child English.

Union has several schools with high Hispanic enrollment clustered in Monroe and offers seminars on how to bridge the language barrier. Monroe's 850-student East Elementary, more than 50 percent Hispanic, started a dual-language kindergarten this year when the school learned that the incoming class might be as high as three-fourths Hispanic. The program is based on a dual-language model at Snowhill Academy in rural Greene County in northeast North Carolina. Gail Edmondson, Snowhill's principal, says the school may have to end the program because it can't recruit enough Spanish-speaking teachers.

Reed said the district hopes to add two ESL teachers who would focus on helping teachers with their lesson plans instead of coaching individual students.

Still, the language barrier is the key obstacle.

Since 1999, the number of ESL students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools increased from 3,357 to 8,964, with more than half speaking Spanish. The district recently requested money for more ESL teachers. It also recently hired a liaison to help Spanish-speaking parents.

Spanish-speaking parents and activists have complained about the low quality of translation.

One kindergarten teacher -- who didn't want to be named for fear of making her school look bad -- types letters home to parents into a Web site that translates her writing into Spanish, saying she doesn't know how else to communicate with parents.

Spanish-speaking students make up a third of her class, and the school's single ESL teacher, with whom her students learn English for one to two hours a week, doesn't speak Spanish.

Most translation Web sites are haphazard at best, but she feels she has no other choice. The lucky thing, she says, is that her children won't be put through federal tests until the third grade. Maybe by then, she says, they will have caught up.

Government mandates

Fran Hoch, the N.C. Department of Instruction section chief in charge of ESL, said finding solutions for teaching the ESL population didn't get enough attention before federal No Child Left Behind legislation was passed.

"We didn't have the accountability we have now. There wasn't the same motivation to find answers," Hoch said, and students learning English were more likely to slip through the cracks.

No Child Left Behind has forced schools to pay more attention to Spanish-speaking children because it tracks school performance by several subgroups, including ethnicity and English proficiency. If one of those subgroups doesn't meet standards, the entire school is penalized, and lack of improvement in subsequent years means the school must allow transfers out. That means the test scores of children learning English have the same weight in the eyes of the federal government as other student groups.

This year, Third Creek Elementary in Statesville, 19 percent Hispanic with about 680 students, had to allow its students to transfer to other nearby elementaries after Hispanic students posted low scores in reading two years in a row. However, few parents statewide have opted to transfer their children as allowed under No Child.

No Child required the state to pass a formal curriculum for students learning English -- something the students began using only this fall, even though ESL has been around for years. The state had to have a standard curriculum or lose $9 million in federal money for programs for students who speak limited English. Before state legislators passed the curriculum in December 2003, teachers used early drafts of it or their own best judgment, operating at the local level.

Other states with larger, long-standing Hispanic populations also yield decisions to local districts. In Texas, where 14 percent of the state's 4.3 million students are in ESL or bilingual programs, the state doesn't provide blanket incentives for teachers to learn Spanish, said Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson. Texas' public school population is 44 percent Hispanic.

Larger districts, like Houston, started programs a decade ago where certified teachers are recruited from Mexico, and the teachers can work in Texas schools while earning U.S. teaching certification. In Florida and California, there aren't any statewide programs for learning Spanish either, though some individual districts have long offered tuition reimbursement for teachers already trained to work with Spanish speakers.

N.C. officials say divvying up resources is a juggling act. While Spanish-speaking students and their teachers may need more resources, so do a whole bunch of other kids, said Leak, the state official who oversees curriculum. Favoring one group would be at the expense of another, she said.

"Education is difficult because the current needs are so pressing. We'd have to push something off the plate that we have to do right now," Leak said.

Continuing growth

Demographers say the trend isn't likely to reverse: The Hispanic population is young and has high birth rates.

And for the first time, large numbers of Hispanics, many previously considered transient, have put down roots.

Between 1995-2000, 124,656 Hispanics moved to North Carolina. Smaller regional communities are finding once-seasonal workers have come to stay, as in Lincoln County, where in the past the apple industry drew workers largely from Costa Rica.

Some nearby communities in South Carolina, however, haven't seen comparable growth; Fort Mill and Lancaster school systems have low numbers of Hispanics. The Fort Mill schools in particular are among the state's wealthiest, educators say, and the area is without the rental housing and jobs that have drawn Hispanics elsewhere.

In the 1990s, South Carolina's Hispanic population tripled, to 95,076. The influx hasn't been as big as North Carolina's, but a few S.C. districts are showing clusters of high-Hispanic population schools. In southernmost Beaufort, for example, the 17,619-student district is now nearly 12 percent Hispanic.

In North Carolina, the elementary schools coping with large influxes typically are in single towns or neighborhoods where Hispanics play a large role in specific labor markets like construction, temporary agriculture work and meat processing.

Many jobs don't pay well.

"Many of our kids are from poor families, and their parents have limited education. Those are already disadvantages in any circumstances. ..." Bazan-Manson said. "It's the law that everyone have access to good education. It's a right, no matter who they are and where they come from."

Demographer Johnson, who has given talks to Charlotte leaders and educators and to the N.C. Board of Education about the population change's impact, says the resulting "demographic delay" left educators unprepared.

"The schools were caught by surprise. People just didn't get it," Johnson said. But:

"To be fair to the schools -- this caught everybody by surprise. People are running as fast as they can to catch up. It will continue going up," Johnson said.

"It's been 10-plus years since we've had the increase, and it's not news," Bazan-Manson said. "They are not going back."

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/ ... 498497.htm

"We have a major problem on our hands," said Andrea Bazan-Manson, executive director of El Pueblo Inc., a nonprofit, Raleigh-based Latino advocacy organization. "We have wonderful teachers, but we're not doing right for the kids."

We speak English here. Learn it. Why should we cater to you?

Oh thats great. "We" have a problem. "We" can't build schools or hire teachers fast enough to keep up with the "booming" Hispanic population. No. YOU have a problem. In fact, you ARE the problem. The over-breeding Latinos hordes who have already ruined their OWN countries by over-populating themselves off the face of the earth. And now they are flooding into OUR country and doing the exact same thing here. And now, "we" have a problem.

Mexican-Americans are making so many babies they are DOUBLING their population every generation. The 30 million immigrants that flooded into America in just the last ten years will double to 60 million in just ONE generation. And then to 120 million in a SECOND generation. And 240 million in just a THIRD generation. And they are PROUD of it. Of course, its not "their" problem. It is now "our" problem.

Solutions, anybody?

"Solutions, anybody?"

We know the solution but getting Bush to close the border and kick out the ILLIGALS is a different story.

3 years ago, I would say my school had no more then 10 Hispanic kids .... today the number is well over 30. It seems like everywhere I look I hear another voice chattering away in Spanish.

The over-breeding Latinos hordes

Whats more is they come here just as they know the are pregnant so the multiple little kiddies that pop out become Americans on the spot. We should revoke that law. Latinos will be well over half the population by 2020.

Another important fact that I believe we don't recognize in the potential population increase is that
YOUNG Latino GIRLS are having babies at an alarming rate.

Did you read El Pueblo's quote, "they are here and they are not going back"!!

I have to go buy some coffee.....it's going to be a LONG NIGHT!!

WE HAVE TO SHUT THESE 501 C 3 Organizations DOWN NOW!!!

It gives them a voice we don't have.....it's OUTRAGEOUS!!

I'm going to file a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service...I wish I was a lawyer, but I'll do my best and then post the letter on the forum.

Maybe MSM will pick it up...it's worth a try.

Back with coffee for another all-nighter!

Later...Keep Up the Good Fight!!

This is Anecdotal Evidence.

But I used to work with US-born Latinos in LA.

They would work 2 or 3 jobs so they could send their kids to private school and keep them out of the gang-infested public schools. They also wanted to make sure that their kids learned the language that 95% of the world's scientific & business correspondence is written in.

I also used to work with some Asians. They made sure that their kids learned English. Even though, let's face it, we are all going to be working for the Chinese pretty soon. My Asian coworkers sent their kid to Chinese language school on Saturdays.

But, unlike Ethnic Pimps who deliberately want to create an underclass; my coworkers realize that English is the way to success.

State and district officials acknowledge they're struggling with the rapid increase but say the needs of Hispanic students must compete for limited resources. They say the enrollment boom's challenges must be met at the local level.

So the resources are already limited and they want the taxpayers in each district to foot the bill. These school boards should be voted out. They get money based on total attendance, so the more illegals in school the more money they are allocated by the state and federal governments, which in case you forgot is US