The goal of bilingual education is to teach students English.

Bilingual Coordinator Anaida Colon-Munoz showed through a presentation to the school board Tuesday night that the Santa Ana Unified School District is doing just that.

Trustees have questioned whether the district’s approach is working since some students are graduating without having a good grasp of either English or Spanish.

But Colon-Munoz showed that the vast majority of students are changing from their primary language to English by the end of elementary school.

“The goal is to acquire English fluency and academic proficiency,” Colon-Munoz said. “The idea that kids learn just in their native language is not true. They are learning in English from the very beginning. “

When they begin English-as-a-second-language instruction, students are taught primarily in their native tongue with English mixed in.

Colon-Munoz displayed a graph that showed by the time students entered fifth grade almost 60 percent of the students were taught totally in English while another 40 percent received some kind of assistance.

That assistance includes after-school tutoring or a writing class aimed at non-native speakers.

Only 18 students were still being taught primarily in their native tongue by fifth grade.

While the majority of limited-English speakers arrive in the first grade, some students enter the district during the sixth and ninth grade.

In other news, Trustee Rob Balen quizzed staff about going out to bid on an estimated $ 880,000 project to wire the entire district.

The money will be used to build a districtwide network so all the schools can be connected to each other by computers. It also would provide connections to the Internet and the city library.

Balen questioned the wisdom of proceeding with the project and purchasing other computer equipment without having a larger district technology plan in place and a technology coordinator to oversee the process.

Balen then cast the lone vote against that project and buying $ 29,000 worth of computers for Santiago Elementary School.

Both items passed, 4-1.



Comments are closed.