Parents fear a well-off school board shortchanged kids on bilingual classes

MENDOTA, Calif. — During monotonous days packing tomatoes and cucumbers in the Central Valley, Zenaide Arroyo took for granted that her children in school were learning math, science, history and, most importantly, English — their new language and their passport to success in the United States.

But Arroyo now worries that they face a life as difficult as her own.

The reason? Two investigations have said that in the current school year alone the Mendota Unified School District is shortchanging 1,000 children of migrant workers by not providing bilingual instruction it could easily afford, having accumulated a $ 10 million budget surplus over the years and paying its superintendent a salary larger than the governor’s.

A federal investigation also has found that the district violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against students on the basis of race and national origin. A state investigation is now looking into whether bilingual education money and special aid for migrant children was misused.

Arroyo, who came to California from Mexico 20 years ago, is one of dozens of parents in this dusty farming town who banded together last year and barraged school officials with questions about students’ poor test scores.

They demanded more bilingual teachers and instigated both an election that recalled a majority of the school board and the dismissal last week of the superintendent.

The group also brought the district to the attention of state and federal investigators.

Mendota, like many other small towns in the valley, is poor.

Of its 8,000 residents, only one-fourth have a high school diploma, according to the 1990 Census.

Until the late 1970s the school board here and those in other valley towns were dominated by ranchers and growers who campaigned on keeping property taxes down. The composition of the boards changed after 1978 when Proposition 13 took away the boards’ rate-setting power, and in Mendota the board became a mix of middle-class white and Hispanic members.

But parents like Arroyo said they viewed the Hispanic members as part of the establishment and deaf to their concerns.

A board widely viewed as out of touch with farm workers “”is one of the remnants of the old social order,” said Joe Holsinger, the deputy state superintendent of education. “”In this case, it was a matter of control, not taxes. ”

An official at the office of civil rights in the U.S. Education Department said civil rights violations like the ones in Mendota were often unintentional.

But “”many migrant farmers don’t know what their rights are,” the official said, “”and so literally thousands of students are not getting an education because they don’t understand English. ”

Mendota parents said they had assumed that their children’s difficulty with school was an individual problem.

Arroyo had twice tried to get her 16-year-old daughter, Yvette, a good student, into high school in another district because she had begun to hang out with the wrong crowd. Both times the other district told Arroyo that her daughter was too far behind in her course work and would have to begin again as a freshman.

“”How did she earn those B’s and A’s in grammar school when she doesn’t know anything in someone else’s eyes? ” asked Arroyo, who places the blame on the grade school and the junior high school Yvette attended.

Arroyo bought an encyclopedia and enlisted local teachers to help Yvette and her two other children after school hours.

At the end of 1992, the junior high principal, Fred Mendoza, walked around town after school to talk to parents of children who were in danger of failing or dropping out.

He told a few parents that nearly half the seventh grade was earning a C average or below and that in state tests Mendota students were in the lowest percentiles in all subjects, scoring lower than students in other poor rural towns in the valley.

Alarmed, several parents started attending meetings of the school board, which was made up of middle-class whites and Mexican-Americans.

But the board dismissed the parents’ concerns, said David V. Daniel, a farm labor contractor and father of two students.

Instead, a board member told parents of the district’s remarkable fiscal soundness: Mendota Unified had just built a beautiful $ 18 million high school campus and was finishing a $ 3 million sunken football field. The district had also amassed a $ 10 million surplus in a savings account; its annual budget is $ 10 million.

The parents wanted to know where the money came from and if the district was fiscally sound at students’ expense.

By March, the parents had learned that the superintendent, Kulwant Singh Sidhu, an employee with the district for more than 25 years, earned $ 116,345 a year, $ 2,000 more than the California governor and, Holsinger said, double what a district of Mendota’s size usually pays a superintendent.

The board defended Sidhu’s salary, saying he was a financial wizard.

And as for the students’ poor academic performance, the board said the district was doing the best it could, given the area’s poverty and education level.

In a town where the per capita income is $ 4,920, school officials said many of the problems stemmed from the home.



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