Immigrants, most from Mexico and Central America, accounted for more than 10 percent of Santa Fe County’s population growth in the 1990s. Some complain the new arrivals drive down wages, drain services and alter the culture. Others say they merely add to the mix.
This is one in a series of reports exploring how immigration is changing Santa Fe and the lives of people who live here. Today and next weekend the Journal North will explore immigration’s impact on public education.
* Santa Fe’s Ortiz Middle School devotes time and space to meeting the needs of its children
Spanish-speaking students many of them from immigrant families have become such a big part of Santa Fe’s Ortiz Middle School that starting next school year, they will have what is in effect their own school within Ortiz.
A wing at Ortiz will be devoted to bilingual and English-as-a-second-language students. In the education world, the approach is called a school within a school.
“We’re compartmentalizing,” Principal Rexie Baca said.
When Spanish-speaking students arrive at Ortiz in the fall, their command of language and academic subjects will be tested.
Then the students will be placed in a program that corresponds with their abilities, a place where school officials believe they can succeed.
“They’re going to have a team of their own,” Baca said. ” Every kid will have four teachers in their core team.”
For elective classes such as art and physical education, known as focus groups, the bilingual students will migrate to other wings of the school and join English speakers.
The goal of this first-time approach in the district, according to Santa Fe Public Schools bilingual education director Rick Gutierrez, is for those students to become functional in English while retaining their home language. Then they will move into the wing of the school with English-speaking students of their grade.
“They’re fortunate,” he said. “They have teachers who are bilingually endorsed in the electives and core academic subjects.”
A bird’s eye view on the new school layout puts the courtyard at the center of the campus, with separate wings for sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, special education and bilingual education.
More than half the student body about 300 students likely will be located in the bilingual wing.
In the past, students with a limited command of English were plugged into any class, assistant principal Margo Shirley said. Most are Mexican nationals who are in need of two- and three-hour bilingual classes to become fluent in English.
Students proficient in both languages will be offered an enrichment course in conversational Spanish.
“We want to encourage them that it’s a gift to be bilingual,” Shirley said. “They’re very, very blessed to be able to speak in two tongues.”
Students ready for more English-language instruction could be separated within the bilingual wing and taught in English.
“There’s a lot of creativity and flexibility of a team,” Shirley said.
She emphasized that the new arrangement doesn’t mean the bilingual students are segregated from the other students.
“They are in a regular classroom, but they are being taught in their native tongue,” she said.
Under the state’s accountability system, Ortiz’s student test scores and other factors have put the school in probationary status. Ortiz must show improvement for two consecutive years to get off the list.
“Our bilingual staff is excited. They have bought into it,” Shirley said. “Something had to change.”
Associate Superintendent Geri Romero-Roybal said Ortiz must schedule times when all students interact in each grade.
“It’s not a new concept,” she said. “It’s a pretty tried and true concept.”
Romero-Roybal said the research shows that the smaller the learning community, the more intimate the setting and the more successful the students. Each mini-school has its own person in charge of discipline and parent participation.
Furthermore, she said in the best bilingual education models, students are taught academics in their first language, as they learn the English language. Once they become proficient in English they move into the general education population.
Shirley, who began at Ortiz this past year, previously taught second-grade bilingual students at Sweeney Elementary School. Until she came on board, Ortiz for several years did not have a principal who could speak Spanish.
Romero-Roybal sees benefits for all in this new approach. When students with different primary languages are mixed in one class, the teacher has the exhausting task of going back and forth between languages. Also, while the teacher instructs in Spanish, the English-only students tended to waste time.
On staff next year, Ortiz Middle School hopes to have three teachers from Spain, recruited to offset the shortage of local bilingual teachers.
Spaniard Dolores Garcia and husband Pedro Lazaro plan to return for another year, after visiting Mexico this summer for the first time.
In Spain, the couple had difficulty finding work. Here, their children, ages 9 and 12, have quickly become fluent in English while the parents switch between the two languages at work.
“I like it,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard.”
Garcia said southern Spain is more similar to Mexico than other regions of her country. Overall, she finds more in common with the Mexican culture than the American culture tight-knit families, for instance.
“The kind of life in Mexico and Spain is similar,” she said. “We cannot forget the Mexican people came from Spain. We’re different cultures but the basis is the same.”
Next year the bilingual program will be more organized with more teachers, Garcia said. She will teach social studies and language arts, using both English and Spanish as appropriate.
This past year, she taught three advanced-Spanish classes for Spanish-speakers. Some immigrants, who have been in the United States for three to five years, start to lose their first language.
Others didn’t learn to read, write and speak Spanish well in the first place either they emigrated at a young age or had little formal school education in rural Mexican communities.
They ask Garcia why they need to study Spanish if they already know it.
“If they didn’t learn well their first language, they probably also have difficulty learning their second language,” she said.
There are no native New Mexicans in her class.
“Their kids don’t want to speak Spanish,” she said. Plus they make fun of her accent.
Garcia said the Mexican national parents are active in school life and attend parent conferences, though most are not college-educated. Many students return to Mexico for summer and Christmas breaks, while others follow the migrant worker patterns of their parents.
“The parents are really nice and they really worry for the kids,” she said. “They have a lot of respect for the teachers and the education and the school.”
Garcia’s husband taught new immigrants this past year. The students had two or three hours of English, but studied some subjects, such as science, in Spanish.
“I think it’s a good program for them,” she said. “It’s difficult to do everything in another language.”
In general, Garcia finds American students are less challenged at school than their European counterparts.
“Kids are used to not reading, writing or working a lot in class,” she said. “The only way to learn two languages is to read a lot.”
A map on the wall of her classroom shows all the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas.
“They didn’t realize how important it is to speak Spanish in this (hemisphere),” Garcia said. “I don’t teach them about Spain. I didn’t feel like doing that.”
Garcia likes New Mexico because of the mix of cultures. But she sees at school how the Spanish-speaking groups separate based on whether they consider themselves Mexican or Anglo or native Hispanic.
“When all the cultures are mixed up, there are always the people who are glad and always the people who don’t like that,” she said.
Yet she sees few signs of outright racism at school.
She also doesn’t notice economic differences among the students. The Mexican families have cars and their children have money, just like the rest of Ortiz Middle School families. Plus many Mexican families send money to relatives in Mexico.
“I don’t consider them poor,” she said. “Probably because I’m also not materialistic.”
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