"Puente" Plan Bridges Gap For Bilingual Pupils

In her first try at college-level English composition, Olga Zaldivar skipped classes, struggled through papers and ultimately abandoned the course before taking the final exam.

But she figures she was lucky to flunk. It gave her a chance to start over in the Puente Program, an unusual bilingual education project now in its second year at Cerritos College.

“That was one ‘F’ I will never regret,” the 24-year-old student said.

In the Puente Program, named for the Spanish word for “bridge,” Zaldivar and other Latino students are getting a second chance to master basic writing and grammar skills. The course is taught over two semesters and designed to bridge cultural barriers that often doom Latino students in more-traditional English classes, Cerritos College counselor Marcelino Saucedo said.

Students are freed from rigid composition assignments and allowed to write about topics that interest them. Papers are not merely graded and returned but discussed in groups by students who later revise their own papers and discuss them again — and then revise them a little more.

Talks With Latino Leaders

As part of each semester’s work, students go into the community to interview Latino leaders who have forged successful careers. And then they write about those.

“It was really a different class,” said Bertha Olivares, a 20-year-old Whittier resident who, because of the program, has begun planning for a four-year college education. “It helped me a lot with my writing. It built my confidence. Little by little I just got interested.”

The Puente Program, offered at Cerritos College and nine other community colleges in California, is founded on a philosophy of encouragement and motivation, rather than rules and roadblocks, Saucedo said.

“In the past, (education) has always been punitive,” the counselor, one of two instructors for the 30-member class, explained. “You turned in a paper and the teacher put red marks all over it. Our process is cooperative. We show the students how to write. We’ll put questions marks on it: ‘Would you expand on that?’ ‘What does that person look like?’ They develop their papers.

“They take great pride in their papers.”

Scheduled for Fall

The class is scheduled to be taught again this fall despite state budget cuts that have jeopardized plans for a statewide expansion of the program. A budget proposal sponsored by state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) and approved by both houses of the Legislature would have allocated $368,000 for the training of Puente Program instructors as part of a yearly workshop in Berkeley.

The funds would have trained enough instructors to expand the program from 10 community colleges to 14, said Patricia McGrath, a teacher at Chabot College in Hayward who began the effort as a pilot project four years ago. Until now, she said, the training workshop has operated almost exclusively on $370,000 in private grants and about $40,000 in support from University of California, which provides office space to help administer the program.

Instructors attend the two-week workshop with the blessing of their community colleges and then teach the program when they return to their schools, McGrath said.

In state budget cuts announced last week, Gov. George Deukmejian deleted funding for the Puente Program, saying it duplicates other minority training programs already paid for by the state.

Torres, however, said public support has been so strong that he may introduce a separate funding bill next year for the program.

“It’s probably the most effective program we’ve ever had in reaching out to Mexican-American children and getting them into colleges and universities,” he said in an interview. “The success rate has been phenomenal.”

Program Endorsements

Torres’ office has received hundreds of letters endorsing the program — from students, parents and community leaders, including Deputy Mayor Grace Davis of Los Angeles, said Beth Bonbright, an aide to Torres in Sacramento.

Since 1982, more than 500 students have enrolled in the program, based on reports received by Torres’ office, Bonbright said. Later evaluations of those students have shown a significant increase in writing skills, grade-point averages and course-completion rates, she said. About one-fifth of the students enrolled in the initial pilot program are now reported to be attending four-year colleges, and an additional third of those students are still in school and planning to transfer to four-year programs.

Both figures are well above the averages for all community college students, Latino or otherwise, Bonbright said.

“It’s clear this program benefits a certain group of community-college students . . . who heretofore have been without the right kind of guidance,” she said. “(It) needs to be expanded and maybe replicated on a grand scale.”

Start of Program

McGrath said she and Felix Galaviz, a Chabot College counselor, developed the program after examining why Latino students often fail in traditional English classes. The program has been expanded year by year as more counselors and administrators have recognized its success in training and motivating students, she said.

At Cerritos College, students are channeled into the program if they have difficulty with writing and grammar, Saucedo said. Often those students came from Spanish-speaking homes where English was seldom spoken or written.

Interviewing and writing about Latino leaders in the community is an important part of the program, exposing the students to role models who have succeeded in school and developed successful careers.

Roberto Espinosa, 21, who grew up in Ecuador, said his community interview was with Ruth Banda, an Affirmative Action worker at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Banda is one of scores of Latino community leaders who have agreed to be a part of the program statewide, McGrath said.

Espinosa said he had always had difficulty in writing but has learned to enjoy putting his ideas on paper. Interviewing the Affirmative Action worker helped him see “there are a lot of obstacles out there,” he said. “But she made it, and we can make it also.”

Making It Through

One of the best testimonies to the program has been its high completion rate, Saucedo said. Of the 31 students who began the program in its first year, 26 finished the first semester and 20 made it through the full year.

“Normally, in a community college, you’ve got a 50% dropout rate in any class, whether it’s psychology or history or whatever,” the counselor said.

Although English is Olga Zaldivar’s second language — she speaks Spanish at home — she was so impressed with the class that she persuaded her brother to enroll. She also enrolled herself in summer school to take a second-year English course, which she hopes will further polish her English skills.

“I could have taken anything else,” Zaldivar said, pointing out that English 2 is just one of many subjects that apply toward course requirements in the field of Humanities. “I could have taken a foreign language. I could have taken Spanish.”



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