MADERA—Bilingual pupils at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School moved into new portable classrooms Tuesday, which some called a first step toward addressing their complaints of unequal treatment.

Other pupils said, however, that the move does nothing about their concerns over being segregated from the rest of the school population.

And parents said they would not rest until they believed the Madera school’s bilingual pupils were learning under similar conditions as other children.

The issue was raised about a month ago when eighth-grader Anita Cortes wrote the principal to ask why the 177 bilingual pupils were isolated from the rest of the school and lacked supplies.

A group of parents began pushing it further, demanding to know why the roofs leaked in the old bilingual classrooms, why the bilingual pupils had no computers in class, why the rest of the school had modern desks and science equipment and why the bilingual pupils had none.

Principal Joe Vived wrote the parents’ group last week, saying that he had forwarded an action plan to the district’s new superintendent and governing board.

In his letter, Vived said he was ‘concerned about these problems and will be working to resolve them.’

But Vived said his plans, which he would not detail, would have to wait until the school board and administrators had decided whether to approve them.

As an example, he said a new bilingual science classroom he had proposed involved a cost obviously beyond his ability to approve.

Margarita Muniz, who is heading the parents’ group, said the move to new classrooms Tuesday was welcome.

The move had been in the works even before Anita’s letter, though, and Muniz said many other issues remained.

‘The principal needs to realize that we’re not sleeping,’ Muniz said in Spanish.

‘We’re not stopping until the bilingual children are in the same situation as the others.

‘If we don’t keep the pressure on, things will return the same as before.’

In addition to moving into bright and attractive new classrooms, the bilingual pupils Tuesday received about 90 newer desks that had been rounded up from elsewhere in the school.

Some pupils still had older desks.

Several pupils said the move was a great improvement inside the classroom, but did not address the segregation issue because the five classrooms are set together at the rear of the school.

‘It’s clean. It’s better,’ eighth-grader Angelina Giron said in Spanish.

‘But we don’t want to be separated.’

Not all the bilingual pupils want to be integrated, however, because of gang and group tensions between newcomers and other students.

‘Everyone over there says they’re going to hit me,’ seventh-grader Julia Maldonado said.

Sharon Pierson, the school’s librarian, fanned out a pile of purchase orders Tuesday showing the school’s purchases of materials for bilingual pupils.

Among them was an order for 90 English-language dictionaries (which have been sitting in boxes awaiting the classroom move) and a 1989 order for nearly $ 900 in Spanish-language computer software that no one can locate.

Unless that software is found, the school apparently has none in Spanish, even though about one in three students call Spanish their primary language.

Pierson said no further software had been ordered for the library’s 11 computers or the bilingual classrooms’ five computers (like the dictionaries, also in storage) because the bilingual department never asked for it.

Pierson also pointed to two sets of Spanish-language encyclopedias and two shelves of Spanish-language books – about 1.5 percent of the library’s 6,000 volumes – as proof that bilingual pupils were not being neglected.



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