Anybody out there speak Macedonian? No? In the city of Garfield, whose schools are already designated as a special-needs district, this is a problem.

If the current state of affairs continues, the Garfield school district may need to hire as many as 10 teachers next fall who not only speak Macedonian, but also are certified to teach in public schools in New Jersey. The reason?

Scattered among Garfield’s 3,100 public school students in five elementary schools, a junior high, and a high school, are two dozen students who speak Macedonian, an ancient dialect that mixes Greek and Illyrian and is the native language in a region of the Balkan peninsula that borders Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria.

Macedonia is almost twice the size of New Jersey, but has only one-fourth as many residents. Why an estimated half-dozen Macedonian families with two dozen school-age children settled in Garfield is a question for sociologists. But why the school district is searching for Macedonian-speaking teachers is symptomatic of the problems that the rigid rules of bilingual education have caused for school districts across the state.

Under state law, and a letter-of-the-law ruling by Attorney General Deborah T. Poritz last week, Garfield is required to set up bilingual classes for any group of more than 20 students who speak a language other than English.

By no means was Garfield alone. Poritz ruled that 240 programs across the state are illegal because they weren’t following state rules for bilingual classes. After Poritz spoke up, state Education Commissioner Leo F. Klagholz stepped in and gave schools a year to set up bilingual programs.

But a year may not be enough. “I can tell you, it’s difficult enough to get Spanish teachers,” said Celene Smith, who supervises Garfield’s programs for bilingual students. “Macedonian teachers? We found one woman who speaks Macedonian, but she’s not a certified teacher. We’ll never find the number we need under the law.”

If Poritz’s ruling holds and communities like Garfield are required to develop more bilingual programs, the scenario will not only tax expenses, but for some obscure languages such as Macedonian, it also may require the immigration of Macedonians to teach those already here.

And then it will require something else: new books. “We don’t have any certified books written in Macedonian,” Smith said.

Across the state, more districts are studying lists of new immigrants and discovering that more than 20 students in their schools speak such languages as Bengali, Vietnamese, Creole, and Gujarati.

Gujarati? For those unfamiliar with it, Gujarati is spoken by more than 20 million people in western India. But in the city of Passaic, it’s the native tongue of at least 20 students. Hence, there will have to be classes in Gujarati. It’s the law.

In Garfield, Macedonian students are scattered across the full range of grades, from kindergarten through high school. Hiring one or two teachers won’t be enough to fulfill the requirements of the law.

Garfield will need four or five teachers just for elementary students and another four or five for junior high and high school. To compound the problem, some of the teachers will have to be certified in science, math, history, and other subjects. The cost: at least $ 500,000 a year, if you hire 10 teachers, each with an annual salary and benefits package of $ 50,000.

And this is not a problem just in Garfield. Across the state, following the letter of the bilingual law will carry a billion-dollar price tag. It may also require a few miracles as well, like finding people who can teach math in Macedonian. Or science. Or history.



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