Suzy Kwon assembles paper cutouts into a model wet-cell battery, as teacher Anne Grewe walks among the school desks, offering encouragement.

The fourth-period bell has sounded at Eastbrook Middle School in Paramus, where the chalky blackboards, U.S. flag, and student drawings of Christopher Columbus are traditional American classroom decor.

But one aspect of the scene is distinctly contemporary: the faces of the students.

Of the 12 children in Grewe’s class, none was born in the United States. They speak nine languages among them and come from homelands as far-flung as Bosnia, Pakistan, Korea, and Japan.

One girl, Jiawei Huang, 12, arrived in October from China.

Classmate Senadin Harba, 14, escaped from Bosnia the month before in a convoy. His school had been destroyed by a bomb.

A decade of immigration into Paramus has boosted the school district’s percentage of foreign students from 5 percent in 1985 to 27 percent this school year. The district has chosen to respond to this influx with an English as a Second Language program that offers instruction in English only, rather than with bilingual instruction that combines English with the students native tongues. District officials see the ESL program as their only practical alternative.

“Many parents don’t want bilingual education,” said Harry Galinsky, who retired this year after a decade as superintendent. “They have the American dream; they want their kids to learn English as quickly as possible and they see this as the fastest way.”

But ESL programs around the state are in jeopardy. The state attorney general ruled this year that districts with more than 20 students speaking the same native language must begin providing full-time bilingual classes by next fall.

In Paramus, Korean and Japanese students exceed that threshold, and Hispanics are quickly approaching it. District officials want a change in state law to allow students to remain in English-only programs.

“We’re saying to the state, Give us the flexibility, ” said Paramus Superintendent Janice Dime. “If we had a constituency that wanted bilingual education, we would have to provide that. We’re asking for flexibility and that they hold us accountable for results.”

Officials say it would be difficult to recruit bilingual teachers in Korean and Japanese, citing their experience in the late Eighties when they advertised such posts and attracted no qualified applicants.

And they worry that as the district becomes even more diverse, they will face a recruiting nightmare at a time when state aid for educating foreign students has been frozen for three years.

The 130 students in Paramus ESL program speak a total of 20 foreign languages: Arabic, Cantonese, Farsi, German, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Filipino, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Russian, Thai, Telugu, Turkish, and Urdu.

Unlike many poorer school districts, Paramus usually enrolls immigrants who have solid academic backgrounds. Many come from well-educated families, and are often ahead of their American peers in math, district officials say. So, they argue, it makes sense to let the students focus on their overriding challenge: learning the language.

“We are trying to learn English,” said Suzy Kwon, a 12-year-old Korean immigrant, who wants to remain in English-only classes. “We can speak Korean in Korea and when we go back home. But it’s better that they teach us in English.”

The seventh-grader, who emigrated from Korea last year speaking almost no English, also has a math tutor, flute and piano lessons, an English-language tutor, and Saturday Korean school in her native language. This year, she’s reading “Gone With the Wind” and is in honors math along with American students.

Karen Harba, Senadin Harba’s aunt, says her nephew has made great progress in English in the two months since he and his parents and 14-year-old sister, Valdana, came to live with her. For the past two years, the family had been hiding in a basement shelter in Sarajevo.

“I can tell the difference already,” said Karen Harba. “Before, I would try to speak to them as family and couldn’t. Now he can understand enough to translate to his parents.”

The ESL class isn’t merely school taught in English. Grewe’s class combines Grades 6, 7, and 8 in one room. The ESL teaching method uses simple sentences and vocabulary and real-life examples and hands-on projects, called “realia,” rather than more abstract lessons.

On a typical day, the morning is filled with language arts: filling in blank words in a poem, using the dictionary, questioning a guest speaker, writing essays.

New students do simpler lessons in another area. In one, Jiawei and Senadin join classmates trying on different colored clothes and naming each one, prompting peals of laughter as children swell in size under layers of garments.

Students disperse throughout the day to attend math, music, gym, art, and other special classes with American students.

In the afternoon, they return to the ESL class for instruction in science, reading, social studies, and other subjects such as computers.

Classes at Paramus High School are similar, except that students move from room to room and take up to four language periods.

Critics say that by focusing so much on language classes, ESL students are in danger of falling behind in subjects such as geography, world history, and others that they could be studying in bilingual classes.

Paramus school administrators point out that their English-only program has a zero dropout rate and that 90 percent of students pass the 11th-Grade High School Proficiency Test. Most students move to the regular program within three years.

Miran Choi said her youngest daughter, Sun-Young, who was 9 when the family emigrated from Korea, at first felt abandoned in her English-only class.

“When she came home she cried for 30 minutes every night,” Miran Choi said. “She wanted to go back to Korea, because all day they were only Americans. All I could do was hug her.”

But five months later, Sun-Young could speak enough English to talk and make friends and is now a straight-A student in the regular program at Eastbrook.



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