Teacher reads in English: some can't understand

The Corona-Norco Unified School District doesn't have enough bilingual teachers and often does not match those it does have with the appropriate students.

El Cerrito Elementary School teacher Kitti Lindusky speaks fluent Spanish and holds a master’s degree in bilingual education.

But, every one of her fifth-and sixth-grade pupils speaks English.

Across town at Adams Elementary School, Sharon Schmidt is relying on her extremely limited Spanish to reach a third of her class.

“I’m not enough,” said Schmidt, who has eight second-graders who speak little or no English. “I feel that I’m effective to a certain degree, but there are some that I feel I’m just not there for. I can’t be reaching for my English/Spanish dictionary all the time. ” The fact that Corona-Norco Unified School District officials frequently do not match their trained bilingual teachers with the appropriate students frustrates teachers.

More important, it cannot help but influence the learning of the 3,200 students in the district who speak Spanish or the 300 or so students speaking everything from Vietnamese to Punjabi.

The reasons are two-fold.

Bilingual teachers are scarce in Corona-Norco, as they are all over the state. And, year-round schedules at eight Corona elementary schools fragment the district’s already limited resources. Teachers and students are divided among four year-round class schedules or tracks. As a result, limited-English students on one track do not have access to a bilingual teacher on another track.

Another factor is that school officials do not want to divide children by ethnicity. A laudable goal, but one that can be taken too far, said Leroy Hamm, a consultant for the state Department of Education who visited the district recently and criticized the bilingual program.

“There is this great fear of segregation and they went the opposite way, scattering them over the whole school,” he said.

Hamm said as long as classrooms are mixed to some extent, or students are mainstreamed for some portion of each day, it is not illegal segregation.

For example, Riverside Unified School District officials cluster bilingual teachers on the “yellow” track at their eight year-round elementary schools. Parents still choose their child’s schedule, but only after they are told where the qualified teachers are.

“Most of our parents will opt for putting their kids where the resources are,” said Aurora Gonzalez, who coordinates bilingual education in Riverside Unified. “It offers them better access to the core curriculum. “

The practice of scattering limited-English children throughout the school is not universal in Corona-Norco Unified. Home Gardens, Jefferson and Parkridge elementary schools and Centennial High School all have classrooms specifically targeted for students with limited English. Assignments at other traditional schools are up to the principals, depending on whether they have any qualified bilingual teachers. Some schools do not.

So whether because of year-round schedules or simply the shortage of trained bilingual teachers, it is common in Corona-Norco to see children who speak no English sitting in classrooms with a teacher who speaks no Spanish, or only a little.

Linda Hopper, an El Cerrito kindergarten teacher, has two students who speak no English and two others who speak just a little. All Hopper knows are the words for shapes, colors and numbers, so she values the bilingual aide who visits for an hour twice a week and the occasional parent volunteer.

When she sat down on a stool to read to her class recently about Clifford, the big red dog, it was clear that the two little girls who speak only Spanish were bored. They studied their hands, looked off toward other sounds in the classroom and waited for the book to be over.

Hopper said she noticed, but had no choice.

“Hopefully, somewhere along the line they will run into enough people with enough language to help them,” she said.

Dorothea Wilson, the principal of El Cerrito, said most teachers need more training to reach their limited-English children. But, she did not think the school should return to putting all the Spanish-speakers in a class with a Spanish-speaking teacher.

“It was a crutch,” she said. “It was handicapping them. “

She said children who had been in bilingual classrooms for four or five years in a row still were not fluent in English.

She said that at least now the Spanish-speaking children are hearing English most of the time and interacting with their English-speaking classmates.

Students do develop “survival English” rather quickly, but it may be misleading, according to many teachers and bilingual aides.

Even when they can quote Bart Simpson to a friend or read out loud in class, they may not understand enough English to get them through science class.

“They learn to read without understanding,” said Macrina Hernandez, who has tutored thousands of children in her 17 years as a bilingual aide at El Cerrito. “They can read it, but when you go back and ask them what happened and why, they can’t tell you. “

She said if children learned to read in their first language they would transfer that knowledge to English. At the very least, they would have the lifelong ability to read books in Spanish about history, science or math. They could even pick up an English/Spanish dictionary and learn some English.

She said reading should be the first priority. “If we can not get them early enough and strong enough in the reading, then you will lose them by the time they get to high school,” she said.



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