The federal Office for Civil Rights has released an investigation blasting Mendota Unified’s bilingual education program, saying the school district denied limited-English-speaking students equal educational opportunities.

Hundreds of limited-English students at Mendota received no bilingual instruction, some teachers were ‘wholly unfamiliar’ with available bilingual materials, and some teaching aides designated as bilingual weren’t fluent in Spanish, the report said.

As a result, the report said an ‘alarming number’ of students were below grade level or failing.

The report, released last week, was prompted by a complaint from Adelante Mendota, the parents’ group that successfully recalled five of seven school board members earlier this month.

Alex Ramos, an Adelante member who won a school board seat, said the report ‘confirms all of the allegations that Adelante had been making for the past year. We were told we were crazy.’

Now, the new school board will address the problems, Ramos said.

‘We’ll start to turn it around,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be fixed overnight – we’re talking about over 10 years of neglect.’

District Superintendent Kulwant Singh Sidhu was unavailable to comment Wednesday. However, Assistant Superintendent Peggy Green said the report wasn’t surprising.

‘There’s only two or three things that are different from the state department report,’ she said. ‘We’re handling both of them together.’

Similar findings

Last month, the state Department of Education released its investigation of the district’s bilingual education and compensatory education programs. Both the state and the federal report found similar shortcomings in the district’s bilingual program and required the district to report on solutions by March 31.

The federal report – conducted by a division of the U.S. Department of Education – examined only the bilingual program and provided more detail on the program’s problems.

For example, the federal report said some teachers ‘expressed a lack of knowledge’ about appropriate teaching techniques for limited-English students.

One teacher at McCabe Junior High ‘stated that he did not know how many students in his class are (limited-English) and how many are (fluent in English). This teacher opined that students having difficulty in the class simply do not apply themselves.

‘Although several students have asked the teacher for primary language assistance, the request could not be granted because of (the teacher’s) lack of bilingual training. An estimated 20 percent of that class was failing.’

The report continued: ‘One high school teacher informed OCR that she had ‘no idea’ whether students were comprehending the subject matter since she did not speak Spanish. One aide informed OCR that students are ‘getting frustrated,’ and that one student is failing simply due to not understanding English.’

Other teachers and aides were ‘wholly unfamiliar’ with materials available for limited-English students and were unaware the district had Spanish-language textbooks, the report said.

‘Largely unaware’

In addition, the district told investigators that almost all of its 100-plus teachers aides spoke Spanish. But investigators discovered that the district was ‘largely unaware’ of the aides’ training and skills, and some aides who worked with limited-English students weren’t actually fluent in Spanish.

To correct many of these problems, the district has recently implemented a training program for teachers who work with limited-English students and has encouraged teachers to work toward their bilingual credentials, the report said.

Other problems with the district’s bilingual program related to identification of limited-English students. The report said the district misclassified hundreds of limited-English children, identifying them as English-speaking instead.

‘As a result of the misclassification, hundreds of (limited-English) students were being taught in regular education classes with little or no special language assistance made available to them,’ the report said.



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