City schools a lingual melting pot

It wasn’t so many years ago in New Hampshire that bilingual education was the norm for many students. Parochial schools taught lessons half the day in French and half the day in English.

It wasn’t done to preserve French culture. It was done because many youngsters, from French-speaking families, needed to become fluent in English as well. In fact, it was just about 30 years ago that the Catholic schools ended the bilingual approach, and began teaching French as a second language.

Today it is the public school system that has the task of helping increasing numbers of non-English- or limited-English-speaking students become fluent in both verbal and academic English.

While the team of consultants from SchoolMatch who performed an audit of Manchester’s educational effectiveness praised the school district’s English as a Second Language program, the coordinator of the city’s program said the district is struggling to meet the need.

Dr. Katherine McLane McCarthy said Manchester now has nearly 1,400 ESL students in a total student body of nearly 17,000 and the number is increasing rapidly. “We’ve already picked up another 300 kids since June and we always pick up more in April and May,” she said.

The students now represent 60 languages and 72 countries. Not all of the students are immigrants or refugees. In fact, she said, only 35 percent are refugees who are resettled here through the International Center.

Many refugees have had their educations disrupted because of war or other situations that have forced them to flee their native lands. The bulk of the refugees now are from Bosnia, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo. There also is a group of Kurds.

“We know that the next group to come are the Togolese,” she said, French speakers who have been in refugee camps in Benin. Some refugees have been in camps for years, like the 18-year-old from Sudan who had spent 15 years in a refugee camp in another country before coming here.

Because refugees fled for safety, or were forced out of their homes and would like to return, they frequently have disrupted or limited education and the effects of stress to overcome. McCarthy, who attended an ESL conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week, said one of the workshops reminded her about the effects on adjustment. “When you hear it again, what they’ve gone through is mind boggling,” she said.

In contrast to the situation of refugees, immigrants — who come from a variety of countries, including Korea, Haiti, and China — are here voluntarily. There still are cultural adjustments.

McCarthy said about 40 percent of the ESL students speak Spanish. A number of them are Americans, from Puerto Rico or mainland United States. While some speak “street” English, they do not have adequate English for school work, especially in upper elementary and secondary school.

At the elementary level, the non-English speakers are in magnet classes, receiving services six hours a day. After a year or two, they often are mainstreamed, in a regular classroom with pullouts or support in class for 45 minutes a day.

“To go from six hours to 45 minutes is a huge jump,” said McCarthy, especially in the upper grades. “There’s a big difference between oral English and academic English. A year in the self-contained magnet (class) will give them the oral proficiency (but) it takes, on the average, five to seven years to acquire the (academic) proficiency,” she said.

“What we’re working on is another level. An intermediate level where they’d have two hours of language arts (a day) with an ESL tutor,” she said. Money to pay for additional staff is an issue, and McCarthy said she is forever writing grant applications to get funding. But an even bigger obstacle is space.

Classes are scattered throughout the city. Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education Catherine Hamblett said: “We have to keep dividing classes We have no room.”

Hamblett said there are other needs. “We still don’t have an ESL kindergarten program. We need to expand our translations of written documents, which we’re working on. We need to improve our identification of special education students who are in the ESL program.”

Upwards of 300 new students a year are identified as needing services that the city is obligated to provide. When students register for school, a home language survey is part of the paperwork. If a language other than English is spoken in the home, youngsters need to be tested to determine their English proficiency.

The number of students receiving services in Manchester jumped dramatically in 1997, after the U.S. Department of Education came in and investigated. “The (federal) Office of Civil Rights came in three years ago and put us under a monitor to ensure we do meet these needs,” she said.

Hamblett sees no end to the annual increase of more than 300 students, classified as Non-English Proficient (NEP) and Limited English Proficient (LEP).

Money to provide services is a significant issue, because the federal government provides only $ 120,000 to be distributed by the state under the Emergency Emigrant Education Fund. Nevertheless, failure to meet the students’ needs can jeopardize other federal funding. Manchester has dramatically increased its services since the OCR audit.

In 1997, there were 21 ESL staff members, 12 teachers and 9 tutors, for 395 students. For this school year, there are 62 staff members, 34 teachers and 27 tutors for nearly 1,400 students, with more to come before the school year ends in June.

The financial costs, too, have jumped. District spending for ESL programs in 1997 was about $ 650,000. This year, the outlay exceeds $ 1.8 million.

There are few elementary schools without ESL programs. McCarthy said Beech Street School, with 29 percent of its 587-student body in the ESL program, is the most diverse in the state. Manchester Central High School has the city’s second highest proportion of ESL students at 10 percent.

Most students are served in their own schools, with only those who need the all-day program sometimes being bused to one of the magnet schools.

Teacher Kim Warren had 18 students who speak 12 different languages in her Beech Street School ESL classroom last week. “Maybe 23 children have gone through my room this year,” she said.

Warren said that over the last 10 years, the youngsters arriving are a less literate group. “They are coming so much farther behind,” she said. “After a year, they have spoken language, but not reading and writing.”

How quickly the children can move into the mainstream also depends on their age at arrival, she said. If they come at a very early age and are placed in a magnet classroom, “they can sneak out into a regular first or second grade, because others are just beginning to read and write.” But if they are in fifth grade, they can’t move into a regular class because they can’t process the academic materials, she said. They have too much English for the magnet classroom, but not enough for mainstreaming. Warren can appreciate the problem today’s non-English speakers face. Her mother, Ilda , who celebrates her 70th birthday today, was put in the first grade when she moved from Portugal to Manchester at age 10. “She was so embarrassed,” said Warren, although she moved up through the grades quickly as she became fluent in English.

Warren said it’s a fine balance today, trying to not keep youngsters in the magnet classroom too long, but also trying to not mainstream them too soon. “A lot of my children, I mainstream for math,” she said, while keeping them in the ESL classroom for the rest of their subjects.

Children with what Warren calls “interrupted English” are also a challenge. That often occurs with youngsters from Puerto Rico, who are bilingual but have moved back and forth between the island and the mainland and, often, “they have some gaps academic gaps.”

Parental attitudes also come into play, with some parents pushing to have youngsters mainstreamed quickly. Sometimes it’s a matter of cultural issues and views, which is where the International Institute of New Hampshire is very helpful. The institute, 315 Pine St., supervises the resettlement of refugees. With an eye to serving the ESL population better, McCarthy continues to write grants. “We need money. We write grants.” She sighed, then said: “Of course, we’re competing against Florida and California (but) we keep plugging.”

Right now, McCarthy has a program for training tutors, who, for the most part, are not certificated educators. Some of the tutors are bilingual and some are not; a professor from the University of New Hampshire is helping train them to better serve their students. But that’s just three Friday afternoon sessions.

She’s trying to get a grant to fund a teaming approach that would have ESL professionals teach the mainstream teachers how to support the ESL students. “They are everybody’s kids,” she said.

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SchoolMatch: basic facts and history

An audit of educational effectiveness in the Manchester School District was done late last year by educational consultants from SchoolMatch, a Westerville, Ohio, company.

Members of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce contributed the $ 40,000 to pay for the audit, at the suggestion of Superintendent Normand Tanguay.

Manchester was compared to similar school populations in 10 other national locations with respect to items like leadership, appropriateness of goals, parent and education professionals’ perceptions and policy development.

Information was collected through surveys of parents, staff and administration and by a three-day visit by consultants, who also spoke with focus groups.

CM+RT Because New Hampshire schools do not take nationally used standardized tests covering math, language arts, social studies and science, Manchester students were compared to demographically similar student populations in the state, based on results of the New Hampshire Educational Improvement and Assessment Program.

-RTCM+RT Manchester students were ranked higher than average on 10th grade test results, but lower on third and sixth grade results.

-RT Among the programs praised was English as a Second Language, although the consultants suggested test results from those students be pulled out of the NHEIAP results to see if they affected the overall grade results.



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