District Struggles With Bilingual Needs

* Santa Fe schools chief says more money is needed in this critical area

Belen Rios, a native of Mexico who lives in Pojoaque, has implored the Santa Fe Public Schools board to split each day between English and Spanish instruction for her three children.

“These are our roots, our heritage,” she said.

She also wonders why elementary school teachers gave her son passing grades when he was far behind in basic subjects. Now a seventh-grader, he has never caught up.

Roberto Mondragon, a former lieutenant governor, wants the school board to consider starting dual-language schools for the sake of his grandchildren.

And U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley has called for public school districts to create, in the next five years, 1,000 new dual-language schools that instruct children in English and a native language.

But right now, the problems facing bilingual educators in the Santa Fe schools may be a bit more elemental.

There just isn’t enough money.

The number of bilingual programs in Santa Fe schools has increased over the past four years along with an influx of Mexican, Tibetan, German, French and Russian students. Consistent with a national bilingual education crisis, the district has problems recruiting and retaining bilingual teachers.

“Again, it goes back to (state) funding,” Santa Fe Superintendent Veronica C. Garcia said, noting that other states offer more competitive salaries than her schools.

City schools do offer extra perks at the end of the year: $750 for state-endorsed or credentialed teachers and $500 for nonendorsed teachers.

Right now, the district has 88 endorsed bilingual teachers, and 52 teachers on waivers who are working toward an endorsement.

“We could increase the number of bilingual teachers by 25 percent and still be short,” said Rick Gutierrez, who left his principal’s position at Kearny Elementary to become the district’s bilingual education director in September.

The district needs another 20 or 30 to help the current teachers serve 2,235 students with limited English skills, he said.

Five teachers were recruited from Spain during a March trip. Gutierrez said he’s also trying to recruit Mexican bilingual teachers through the University of Monterrey.

Free of cost, local teachers can take the 24-credit-hour bilingual endorsement program through New Mexico Highlands University’s Career Ladder grant.

“We’re trying everything that we can,” Gutierrez said.

Mondragon, for one, wants to know where bilingual education dollars are being spent and at a recent board meeting asked for an accounting of expenditures.

At one time, state dollars generated by each bilingual student in the district were siphoned off elsewhere within the district, Gutierrez says.

Today, all the bilingual money is going for bilingual causes, he said.

“The kids are seeing all the money now,” he assured, adding that they have been for the past three to four years.

Half of the money, or $700,000, goes into the operational fund to pay salaries for bilingual teachers and assistants.

The rest of the $1.4 million the program receives a year is distributed to each school based on the number of qualifying students. Schools can use the money to hire more staff and purchase supplies and training services.

Bilingual students and teachers, though, face other challenges.

Making the transition to American education was such a challenge for the Rios family.

Belen Rios, who raised her concerns at the recent board meeting, wonders how children who often are underfed and underclothed can achieve so much academically in Mexican schools. As far as she can tell, her oldest son, a seventh-grader at Alameda Middle School who has been in Santa Fe Public Schools since kindergarten, is behind in math, reading and writing compared to his peers in Mexico.

Tesuque Elementary School teachers tried to help her son read, but they wouldn’t flunk him because they didn’t want to traumatize him, she said. In her opinion, social promotion only compounds the trauma.

“Children shouldn’t be passed if they can’t read and write,” she said.

“Everyone agrees with you,” school board president Carla Lopez said to Rios. “It’s a question of having qualified teachers to be able to do that.”

Garcia, at the board meeting, also agreed with Rios.

“If children don’t know how to read and write in those early grades, you are setting them up for failure,” she said. Garcia called for smaller classes, more bilingual teachers and more money from the Legislature.

Once Rios learned English and became more involved in the schools, however, things got better for her children. She said it helps that the new principal at Tesuque Elementary, Cliff Cisneros, speaks Spanish.

At Tesuque, 37 percent of the students have limited English proficiency.

Rios’ daughter, a first-grader at Tesuque Elementary, reads and writes well in English and Spanish, she said. Her daughter’s fluency in Spanish probably comes from home, where the parents speak and read to their children in Spanish.

Tesuque Elementary School offers one hour of daily bilingual enrichment for 25 children in grades kindergarten through third grade. It’s not available to students in older grades.

A bilingual teacher intern conducts the program, which is designed to help students keep their native language.

Most of the Mexican children at Tesuque Elementary speak English “very well,” while their parents are less fluent, principal Cisneros said.

He and several teacher assistants speak Spanish.

“We’re able to communicate with our families,” he said.

Rios suggested a bilingual person should tell non-English-speaking parents their rights and responsibilities in the U.S. public education system at the start of every school year.

Another problem, in Rios’ eyes, could be the attitudes of the students.

Her husband, Sergio Rodriguez, was a high school math teacher for 15 years in Mexico, but he had a hard time understanding the unruliness of American students when he went to work here. When he graduated from Highlands University. he thought he was prepared to teach school here, but he lasted about six months at Santa Fe High School.

“In Mexico, our teachers are like a second parent. We are respectful to our teachers so they can work with us,” his wife said. “Here, my husband discovered the teachers are fighting with the students. He (told me) he can’t be a baby-sitter and a teacher at the same time.”



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