School marks 1 year of bridging lingual barrier

Bilingual education has never skipped a beat in South Bay Union School District, not even after the passage of Proposition 227.

The statewide initiative approved by voters in 1998 called for an end to most bilingual education, and it could have radically changed teaching in the South Bay district, where 41 percent of the 10,000 students are English-language learners.

So to continue teaching students their math, science, social studies and language arts in Spanish while gradually improving their English, South Bay educators trumped Proposition 227 with another popular reform — the charter school movement.

South Bay Charter School, known to its Spanish-speaking attendees as la escuela autonoma (the autonomous school), is a year old this month. Charter schools are public schools but are free from many of the rules in the state Education Code — including the provisions of Proposition 227 — as long as they meet a performance standard agreed to in their founding documents.

Charters are often tailored to community needs, and in South Bay’s case, the need was teaching English as a second language. A founding committee of parents, teachers and administrators decided the best way to do that was to continue bilingual education — teaching students in their native language to allow them to keep up academically while learning English, and gradually increasing the portion of their day that’s taught in English.

Under Proposition 227, non-English-speakers are to be put into “sheltered” English for a year, during which there’s an emphasis on vocabulary and frequent use of visual prompts to help learn the language, before entering mainstream English-language classrooms.

Other school districts preserved established bilingual programs by using a waiver clause written into Proposition 227. Parents can choose to keep their children in bilingual education by signing a waiver exempting them from the proposition’s requirements, although they’d have to send their children to a month of English-only classes first.

“At the time we made the decision, we recognized that we would have to get a waiver from every parent and that we would have to allow for 30 days where the students were not receiving instruction (in their native language), and quite frankly we thought that was a travesty,” Vetcher said. “That didn’t make educational sense.”

Also, parents must sign waivers annually to keep their kids in bilingual education. A student stays enrolled in a charter school until a parent decides to pull out the child.

The charter school movement has spawned 27 charter schools in San Diego County, including one for home-schoolers in Oceanside, a school sponsored by the California Teachers Association and a school for first-generation college students on the University of California San Diego campus.

What sets South Bay Charter apart is that it really isn’t a single school at all, but 3,400 students scattered among classrooms in 12 schools in the South Bay Union district.

“It is similar, if you want to make the analogy, to a virtual school,” said Johanna Vetcher, South Bay assistant superintendent.

What has happened is that every bilingual classroom in the district became part of the charter school. There’s no principal. The teachers work for the district, not the charter school.

“When you speak your own language, you learn another language better,” said Sandra Real, president of the district’s bilingual advisory committee. “You need to learn your own language to be able to grasp a second language.”

Real had her twin 9-year-old daughters in the charter school last year, but they’ve since mastered enough English to enter English- only classes in fourth grade.

Parent Socorro Naranjo said she enrolled her children in the charter school as a vote of confidence in South Bay’s bilingual education program. Her older children are thriving after going through it. She has a daughter at Berkeley and a son in Advanced Placement courses at Southwest High School.

Because she speaks little English herself, she and her elementary school-age children speak Spanish at home.

“I prefer that they continue with Spanish so that they learn it well,” Naranjo said. “I prefer that they speak two languages well.”

Proposition 227 author Ron Unz estimated that about a dozen bilingual charter schools have formed statewide, and he has no objection to them — for now.

But, he said, “One of the provisions that a charter school has to obey is it has to show that its educational program on an ongoing basis is successful.”

Unz believes that students in English-only classes will score higher on state-mandated tests than bilingual education students. That could make the legal standing of bilingual charters doubtful and cause parents to think again before retaining their children in non- English classes, he said.

The agreement that establishes South Bay Charter School calls for an annual report on its performance. Vetcher will deliver that report tomorrow at the school board meeting at district headquarters, 601 Elm Ave., Imperial Beach. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.

Vetcher’s report is filled with data on the bilingual education program that gradually weans students off Spanish instruction over as long as six years.

The bilingual education students score impressively on the Spanish Assessment of Basic Education, a state-mandated test. About-three quarters of South Bay students score above the national average on the reading and math tests.

On the English-language SAT 9 tests, the longer students are in bilingual education, the more likely they are to score above the national average. About 36 percent of South Bay bilingual students who have been in the district for six years scored above the national average on their SAT 9 reading test last year.

Of the native-English-speaking South Bay district sixth-graders who took the SAT 9 reading test last year, 55 percent scored above the national average. There’s no comparison of bilingual education students to the approximately 600 non-English-speaking students who choose English-only instruction.

Teacher Elva Lopez-Zepeda, who teaches third grade at Nicoloff Elementary School, said she believes the reorganization of the bilingual program under the charter has put kids into English- language learning earlier.

“Now I demand it a lot sooner,” she said.

Meanwhile, the students in her class alternate between books such as Honest Abe and “El Cuento de Pedro, El Conejo” (“The Tale of Peter Rabbit”).

Ramon Ramirez Diaz, one of Lopez-Zepeda’s third-graders, said he was nervous at the beginning of the year because he’d heard the teacher was strict but that he’s enjoying his classes now.



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