Educating Edwin
The Courant is chronicling the struggle in Hartford's schools to make good on Superintendent Anthony Amato's bold pledge. The transitions come in a blink, like the click of switching television channels or stepping through a classroom doorway. English in one room, Spanish in another. More Spanish, a bite of lunch. English on the playground. Spanish from the teacher who says it's time to line up and go inside. Blink, click. So it goes, the whole day, for 6-year-old Edwin Almodovar Jr. He is a boy who likes Pokemon, Ricky Martin and Tarzan. He handles a pair of scissors better than nearly all of his classmates. His hair, combed straight back, rests in a small auburn pile on his little head. Like Tarzan, he explains. He tucks his turtleneck shirt into baggy trousers. His Skechers sneakers are nearly always tied. The little voice is still high, birdlike. His cheeks round and full beneath small, dark-brown eyes, like his mother's. He will not tolerate classmates suggesting that he is small. He willingly shares crayons as well as his expanding grasp of English. "Puedo ir a tomar agua?" he asks his teacher, wanting a quick drink at the hallway fountain. Moments later, to a new friend, in clear English: "You can borrow my Game Boy." In his second year attending a small "dual language" program at Hartford's Moylan School, Edwin bounces comfortably between linguistic worlds. While most Spanish-only students in the city's bilingual program gradually ease into English, Edwin has been bombarded with English since kindergarten. As a student in Ruth Zayas' first-grade classroom, he spends his days paired with Brittany Hernandez, a talkative first-grader in Marcie Passman's adjoining classroom who is learning Spanish. But his parents, Edwin Almodovar and Lydia Oyola, have a more uneasy partnership with public education. They remain wary of the Hartford schools and have sent Edwin's older brother, Pedro, a fourth-grader, to a parochial school. For the Almodovars, this is the last chance they will take on Hartford. "When you come from another country, the U.S. is a big deal. But they have forgotten about some things here ... like education," says Almodovar, 34. "If you want to improve in life, you have got to know English. If you are bilingual, the opportunities are better." Because they live clear across the city, near the Wethersfield line, they had to obtain what Hartford calls "special permission" for Edwin to attend Moylan. Almodovar juggles three jobs, as a custodian in the evenings for the town of Glastonbury and in the early mornings as a lab technician at Hartford Hospital, plus his own home improvement business. Oyola works as a head teacher with Catholic Family Services and is planning on graduate school. Last December, they bought a home, with a backyard pool, on a quiet South End street. These are parents Superintendent of Schools Anthony A. Amato desperately needs more of if he is to build long-term success in Hartford: young, ambitious homeowners. But they're also the ones who will quickly send their children to private school if they don't like what they see. These two remain skeptical. There's no space in their lives to take chances on education. "I was really frustrated with the public schools in Hartford," says Oyola, 38. "When I sent (Pedro) to kindergarten ... it was all in Spanish. We are here and we have to learn English." But little Edwin's success at Moylan begins to tug. He loves school, his teachers, learning English. At lunch one day in early November, he listens intently to his partner Brittany's chatter in English. The meal is some kind of meat with gravy, mashed potatoes, yogurt, an apple. The noise is deafening; like an echoing train station clogged with commuters. A frenetic janitor races about, mopping up spilled milk. Mr. Beach, the school's gentle security guard, quietly settles disputes around the room. Here at the first-grade table of 12 students, there is a boisterous, messy collision of two languages. Edwin gabs with Brittany in English, then turns to Zuleika for a few words in Spanish. Gaspar and John stick to English. Brittany asks Edwin to say something else in Spanish. They all sing together, laughing: Who let the dogs out? "We talk in Spanish and we talk in English," Brittany explains. "I like Spanish," Edwin responds. This is the idea. Taking A Chance In the summer of 1999, the promise-maker is everywhere. Only months into his new job as superintendent, Anthony Amato's bold plans -- better test scores, laptop computers for students, parents who lead schools instead of bake sales -- have captivated Hartford. But Almodovar and Oyola don't hear, or perhaps don't fully believe, all the promises floating about the city. It all sounds like so much more big-talk and gambling. What's real is the precious future of 5-year-old Edwin. They agonize, and then enroll Edwin in a kindergarten class at a private parochial school. They feel better immediately, as if an old bruise had finally healed. Instead of hope, they see a school system that failed Pedro. Schools in often-beautiful buildings but that seem no better than those in their hometown of Comerio, Puerto Rico. Schools where Spanish-speaking children can feel only like visitors from another country. This won't happen again, Almodovar and Oyola promise. They'll gladly pay for Edwin to attend Saints Cyril and Methodius School, where the Polish nuns have standards, but no bilingual program, and where Pedro now flourishes. In English. Almodovar and Oyola arrived from Puerto Rico in 1995 looking for education, better jobs, a new bilingual life for Edwin and Pedro. They found opportunity, for sure, and a city they feel is decidedly Hispanic. They also tumbled into a school system where Pedro had a good start and then derailed in second grade, when his teacher kept telling them he was doing fine, but in fact he was struggling and learning little English. "It is no doubt that we had a better education in Puerto Rico," says Almodovar, who has learned most of his English since he came to Hartford. Grand declarations from Amato to "never be last again" don't mean much to a family that found schools in which a Spanish-speaking child might go all the way through elementary school before mastering English, where high schools are congested with ninth-graders who read no better than young children. But then, just days before the start of the school year, there's a phone call from Pedro's old kindergarten teacher, Maria Hernandez. She is a woman the family deeply respects. Hernandez now has a new job teaching in something called a "dual language" program, where children learn both English and Spanish from the first day of kindergarten. Most important, she tells them, the Spanish language children are not segregated from their peers who speak English. "Please," Hernandez asks them, "would you give it a try?" Struggling To Survive On warm mornings, the courtyard at Moylan School becomes a bustling town square, where a new resident may be from Hartford -- but also Puerto Rico or perhaps Peru, Cuba, Jamaica or Vietnam. They live, except for a handful like Edwin, in a section of Hartford known as "Behind the Rocks," a neighborhood of tidy square box homes and aging apartment buildings on a hillside between Trinity College and I-84. Years ago, neighborhood residents walked to work at nearby factories. They are demolished now, the jobs gone. At a street corner, an elderly white woman, a crossing guard, stops a low-riding Toyota with a Puerto Rican flag hanging from the rearview mirror. Click, blink: a group of children jabbering in Spanish cross the street. Parents with strollers and cell phones and children with backpacks stream through the archway from Catherine Street. Eight out of 10 come from families where English is not the home language. Near a doorway, Lydia Oyola kisses Edwin goodbye for the day: a stroke of his cheek, a whisper in Spanish to his ear. When the 8:40 bell rings, the sorting begins for most of Moylan's 600 students. English-speaking students go off to their own teachers. Those who aren't "English-dominant," about 200, go either to classrooms in the bilingual program or to English as a second language classes. The bilingual students are taught in Spanish until they gradually transition to all-English. On average, the process takes more than five years. In general, this is the way bilingual education has worked. But last year the state legislature passed a law requiring children to be out of bilingual classes within three years. Nobody really knows how cities are going to do this, especially Hartford, which takes longer to teach children English than any other district in the state. Instead of a bilingual class, Edwin joins the 110 other dual language students in the Moylan auditorium, where they gather briefly each morning. Half are English dominant and half are Spanish dominant, like Edwin. The meeting alternates each day between Spanish or English. On "Spanish" days, teachers and students stand to listen while a cassette recorder plays a plaintive version of La Borinquena, the Puerto Rican anthem. It is a tranquil beginning to a school day that will grow demanding, with frequent jumps between English and Spanish. One morning a few days after Halloween, an English day, Lourdes Soto leads a brief discussion. "Can someone tell me what is going to happen on Tuesday, Nov. 7?" asks Soto, a teacher who oversees the dual language program. On Spanish days, she will not speak in English at the meeting, even if a child does. Three years ago, before Amato, and during a time of great turmoil in Hartford, Soto, Passman, Hernandez and teacher Vernice Duke began to cobble together their dual language program with the help of now- retired principal Donald Carso. "I felt so isolated," Soto says of her past as a bilingual teacher in Hartford. "I saw the wall between monolingual and bilingual teachers." "Teachers wanted to integrate. They felt that being separate was no good." Over the first three years of the program, they have also endured pressure from colleagues in the bilingual program who saw dual language as a threat to their jobs. They've created a new program almost entirely on their own, on top of the other new demands from an impatient superintendent. This year, two more small dual language programs opened at other schools in the city, joining a growing movement around the country. The talk at Moylan now is about creating an entire K-8 school devoted to dual language, maybe bringing together children from Hartford and the suburbs. Some dual language parents have even bought homes in Hartford, just to keep their children in the program. But to this day, Moylan's weary teachers get little extra assistance, even though the dual-language curriculum requires extensive planning and coordination. If they are a solution to children not learning English, no one has told them. English And Spanish, Equally The two classrooms are mirrors, reflective linguistic images of each other. In one there is a math word wall in English. In the other, it is the "matematica" wall. Words, phrases, pictures of countries across the world decorate the walls and hang from the ceiling in Marcie Passman's first-grade room. It's the same in Ruth Zayas' room. These rooms and the lives of the 18 or so students in each are joined by a door that functions like a language portal. Walk through it and you must switch languages. To work, the dual language program needs two teachers committed to close cooperation and lesson planning, one for Spanish-dominant children and one for those who speak primarily English. There is added pressure, too. Passman and Zayas must show that the frequent switching back and forth between English and Spanish is not a hindrance to Amato's mandate for better test scores. Within two years, by third grade, Brittany and Edwin must take their first practice mastery tests -- in English. Passman, 27, is a few years out of the University of Connecticut and an eager teacher reared in the Connecticut suburbs. Zayas is a veteran bilingual teacher who came to Hartford from Puerto Rico 15 years ago. Both have come around to the power of a program, where -- blink, click -- without warning one day a child will start using complete sentences in a second language. As often as half a dozen times a day, the two first-grade classrooms come together, and one English dominant student and one Spanish dominant student pair up as partners. One day, Brittany writes a letter in Spanish to Edwin. He writes back in English. They discuss the letters in English. Edwin will continue to be taught to read and write in Spanish, but already he seems comfortable in both. "I wish we could have had this program 10 years ago. Look at what Edwin is doing," Zayas says one afternoon as children leave her colorful room to go home. She knows he wouldn't be getting this kind of exposure to English in a typical bilingual class. At home, Edwin plays with his brother, often speaking English, especially when they want to try to keep secrets from their parents. At meals and around the house, the family speaks Spanish. Something else has been sneaking up on them, too. The Almodovar family, for the first time, is pleased with what they find in the Hartford schools, even if it's just one program in one school. But the old Hartford -- the one where schoolchildren could lack crayons or where bureaucrats made thoughtless cutbacks -- has not disappeared, either. A New Commitment Lydia Oyola sits on the edge of a polished hardwood stage in the Moylan auditorium, an American flag to her right, Puerto Rican to her left. This morning, Oyola is organizing a protest, and a dozen parents have lingered after the regular start-of-the-day school meeting to listen. For months, parents have been growing more concerned over what they feel is a dismissive attitude toward dual language by the central office, a program Oyola feels is just as important as any of Amato's mastery test drilling programs. Although Spanish-speaking teachers are critical to the program, they can't get them when dual language teachers are sick. Cutbacks have also removed full-time teacher's aides, called paraprofessionals, from kindergarten classes. These parents feel that in a program like this one, even the first grades deserve an aide because the teachers are trying to do so much more. Oyola is both outraged and energized. A letter she wrote to Amato weeks ago went unanswered. Calls have not been returned. What pushed her to do more was an odd, chance encounter the other day with one of Amato's top deputies. The deputy suggested that maybe a parent who has a child attending a school under special permission shouldn't be so outspoken, stirring up trouble for the hard-working superintendent. She thinks of what she learned about social justice in her Catholic Church as a teenager in Puerto Rico. One way or another, Anthony Amato will learn how these parents feel about dual language, she vows. "We are going to make the difference," she tells the parents, in Spanish. "We have to care ... How can we help out teachers if as parents we stay quiet?" She tells them they must go to the board of trustees, tell Amato what they think. She looks to each parent. Some hold babies or rock strollers. Tomorrow morning, she says. "Do any of you think that you will come?" she asks. Among the dozen or so mothers and fathers, heads nod. "You can count on me," one man says, in English. Manana, Oyola replies. Muchas gracias. Something Worth Fighting For In August a year ago, Lydia Oyola and her family were walking away from the Hartford schools. On a snowy morning this December, she has become the sort of committed parent Tony Amato dreams about. Yet today, she is fighting him. She brings a petition with her this morning, plus an agenda she has typed and fliers exhorting parents to attend a meeting at 9 a.m. At Edwin's parent conference a week before, she sat with Ruth Zayas and looked over her son's artwork, his completed math problems and his reading scores. Zayas tells her how far Edwin has progressed, how comfortable he is speaking both languages. Zayas writes her home phone number on a small piece of paper and urges Oyola to call her, any time. How could she not fight for this, she thinks. This morning, jittery downtown administrators have gotten wind of the brewing parent protest. They have called and are now coming out to Moylan for a meeting, hoping to talk quietly with Oyola and avoid an unpleasant scene downtown -- or at a board of trustees meeting. A teacher is near tears. For Irene Coe, in her first year as principal and an enthusiastic supporter of dual language, the stakes are high. In Amato's Hartford, principals can be quickly replaced if test scores don't improve. But in the auditorium, almost two dozen parents have gathered. They wait patiently while Oyola is called into the principal's office and then returns to the parents, telling them the downtown administrators will talk with them. Ironically, Oyola's plunge into the Hartford schools has not come at the bidding of its crusading superintendent, but in standing up to him. She still says she has little faith in the district -- there are no plans to enroll Pedro in public school. But, she has become passionate about Moylan. "I want that my school will make a difference in the system. If the [dual language] program is still here, my son is going to be here," she says. Jaime Aquino, an assistant superintendent, arrives to meet with the parents, along with Marta Bentham, another deputy. But still no Amato, who is busy elsewhere. The meeting is held in Spanish. The parents are told if they have complaints, they should go through the principal. Oyola still has questions. How is it, she asks, that in Amato's Hartford, there is plenty of money for mastery test cramming and after-school "power hours" and her school can't get a Spanish substitute or paraprofessionals to help teachers in kindergarten and first grade? Teachers' aides cost a lot more than an after-school program, Aquino tells them. And besides, he says, how could Amato give just one school more paraprofessionals? He promises to look into the substitute problem. "We need a paraprofessional, full time," Oyola says, in English, offering Aquino a firm handshake and a smile at the end of the meeting. "When that happens, I will be happy." The truth is, she already is. |