Numbers Game

Plainfield schools open doors to more immigrant students

It was a natural slip, but Karl Polm-Faudre gently corrected 7-year-old Julian Cardenas. “I want to hear it in English words,” Polm-Faudre said.

“Two . . . plus . . . two equals four,” the third-grader said, switching from his native Spanish.

It’s a slow process, but gradually all of Polm-Faudre’s students utter more phrases in their new tongue.

The teacher repeats similar sessions like these over and over at Washington Elementary School as the sole instructor and coordinator of the school’s classes in English as a second language.

For years, Plainfield’s melting pot has been simmering as more immigrants move into the city, especially those from Spanish-speaking countries.

This year in the city’s school system, the pot started to overflow.

Normally, the district gets about 50 new students for whom English is a new language, and the district plans accordingly, said Mildred Fernandez, curriculum resource teacher in bilingual education.

But this year 150 students enrolled, bringing the total to 630, and the district has had to make room for all of them, juggling class sizes and staffing, Fernandez said.

“There is a space issue. The more kids you get, you have to figure out where you’re going to put them.”

According to the most recent tally, 571 of those students are enrolled in Spanish-speaking bilingual classes. The other 59 come from other countries. Students in the bilingual program take subjects like math and history in their native languages, and get instruction in ESL – English as a second language – to complement those courses.

To accommodate the growth spurt, the district made quick adjustments. Two years ago, there were only four bilingual classes at Washington Elementary School. This year there are seven. At Emerson Elementary School, officials added another fourth-grade bilingual class.

At Plainfield High School, they hired a third instructor for English as a second language, and now they have full classes of bilingual math, science and history.

District-wide, Plainfield has 35 teachers offering bilingual and ESL instruction, with many of them dividing their time between the two.

At Washington, Polm-Faudre is the only ESL teacher for 174 students.

He works with about a quarter of those students for nine weeks at a time, meeting seven groups of seven pupils a day on a schedule that gives each student four sessions per week.

The district plans to hire four more teachers for Washington next year, so all bilingual students can receive ESL instruction year-round.

There is a statewide struggle to accommodate the growing immigrant population, said Richard Vespucci, spokesman for the state Department of Education. Districts have trouble predicting their staff needs because there is no way to tell how many students with limited English proficiency are going to show up each year, he said.

“Because schools have to estimate who’s coming, they can’t always predict what’s happening in the world,” Vespucci said.

“If something happens and there is some disruption in the life of a community overseas and people come here, there’s no way school officials can know that in advance.”

The state does not penalize the districts for struggling with it, Vespucci said. “They have to do their best,” he said.

There is a statewide shortage of teachers qualified to teach children English as a second language, and Plainfield has been actively trying to recruit.

They hired Polm-Faudre last year during a conference for the National Association for Bilingual Educators in Texas.

The 18-year veteran educator said he had a difficult time learning English himself as a child. “We spoke German and French at home,” he said, adding that he spent most of his elementary school career learning English.

“It was a very negative experience,” said Polm-Faudre. “I hated school. My feeling is that this needs to be a positive experience. All the kids have to learn English, and quickly, so they can integrate successfully into society.”

Fernandez said one does not have to speak the child’s native language in order to teach English as a second language. “There are a series of strategies they use to get the message across” to the children, she said.

It’s evident citywide that there has been a jump in the number of immigrants, said the Rev. Joyce Antila Phipps, a staff attorney with Plainfield-based El Centro Hispanoamericano. Most of them have come from Columbia, El Salvador and Honduras.

“A lot of Colombians are fleeing the civil war in their country,” she said. Among the Hondurans, a number of them received temporary protective status after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. “A year or so later, there has been no recovery at all in their country. . . . A lot of parents who have been here have started trying to smuggle their children across the border.”

Phipps said that while the district says it is handling the influx, school officials need to work harder on equality when the parents come to register their children.

She has heard stories of parents being dissuaded from enrolling teenage children in the schools, she said.

Fernandez denied that anyone has been turned away. “There’s always been some kind of effort to place a child where there is an educational program.”



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