The Boulder Valley school board is the first in the Denver area – and possibly the state – to take an official stand against the latest initiative that would essentially end bilingual education in Colorado.

The board on Tuesday unanimously approved a resolution against the English Language Education for the Children initiative. The initiative, which likely will appear on the November statewide ballot, is backed by California entrepreneur Ron Unz, who successfully passed similar measures in California and Arizona.

“It’s really a giant step backwards for educating kids,” Boulder Valley school board member Julie Phillips said.

The proposal would require children who do not speak English to enter a one-year structured English-immersion program unless their parents request bilingual education – and a school would need at least 20 student waivers at a grade level to offer a bilingual class. There are also limits on who can receive a waiver.

The Colorado Supreme Court approved the initiative’s language last week. Now, supporters have until Aug. 5 to gather about 80,600 signatures of registered voters. If passed, the initiative would be an amendment to the state constitution.

Rita Montero, a former Denver school board member who’s the chairwoman of the group backing the plan, said she’s not concerned about Boulder Valley’s opposition.

“It’s a resolution – it doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “But it’s unfortunate. They’ve apparently had little communication with the outside world on the failure of bilingual education.”

Montero and other supporters of the initiative argue that students in bilingual programs aren’t learning English quickly enough or well enough to compete with their native English-speaking peers and are relegated to second-class status.

Phillips, however, said the Boulder Valley School District’s programs are effective and compared the initiative to allowing only one treatment for cancer, regardless of research on more effective treatments.

Boulder Valley enrolled about 2,550 second-language students, or about 10 percent of the student population, in the past school year.

About 20 percent of the second-language students are in three dual-immersion elementary programs, where Spanish speakers learn English and English speakers learn Spanish. The rest are mainly in English as a second language programs, which are intensive pull-out classes on the English language.

Boulder Valley Superintendent George Garcia said the initiative would prevent English-speaking students from participating in dual-immersion, despite strong community support for students to learn a second language.

There are an estimated 24,000 public-school students in Colorado in bilingual education programs.

Denver Public Schools, where about half of those students attend school, hasn’t taken a position this year on the ballot initiative – despite opposing a similar measure when it was proposed in Colorado in 2000. Denver is under a federal court order to move students out of bilingual education and into all-English instruction in three years.

(Contact Amy Bounds of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Co., at boundsa(at)dailycamera.com.)



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