Georgia Town Finds Ways to Cross a Language Barrier

DALTON, Ga.—Irma Diaz was far from the familiar surroundings of Monterrey, Mexico, when she first came to Georgia in the fall of 1997. But the teacher felt right at home as soon as she walked into the elementary schools here.

“When you see so many Hispanics, you think, wow, this is amazing,” she said. In some schools two-thirds to three-quarters of the students were Latin Americans, the vast majority of them from Mexico.

Faced with a surge of Spanish-speaking students that threatened to paralyze the school system, Dalton authorities have adopted a novel solution. They decided to bring in teachers from Mexico to help the children adjust to U.S. schools and learn English while retaining their native language.

This town in northwestern Georgia, the self-described “carpet capital of the world,” is breaking new ground in its efforts to adapt to a major influx of Hispanic immigrants. Drawn by plentiful and relatively well-paying jobs in the area’s carpet mills, thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans have streamed into Dalton in the last decade, dramatically altering the demographic mix.

While such arrivals have met with local inaction or resistance in other places, here the influx has prompted far-reaching innovations intended not only to ease the immigrants’ transition to American life, but to create a new, more bilingual community. Through a program called the Georgia Project that was conceived to deal with the immigration crisis in the local schools, Dalton is encouraging all students, including non-Hispanics, to become fluent in English and Spanish.

“This is the way of the future,” said Erwin Mitchell, a Dalton lawyer and civic leader who helped establish the Georgia Project. “The growth of our community is going to be Hispanic, and not Anglo or white.” Ultimately, he said, “the aim of our school system is to make it possible for every student to become bilingual by the time of graduation.”

Dalton is just one of many communities around the country that have grappled in recent years with the pros and cons of bilingual education as they deal with the complications of teaching non-English speakers in U.S. public schools.

In Southern California, a new, privately funded program called the “Alianza project” is trying to overcome a shortage of Spanish-speaking educators by training Latino immigrants who used to be teachers in their homelands. When they moved to the United States, many found they could not obtain state certification and turned to other jobs, sometimes even working as housekeepers, janitors or gardeners.

In one heavily Latino elementary school in the San Fernando Valley, frustration with a lack of Spanish-speaking teachers boiled over this month with the beating of a white principal who had drawn complaints from Hispanic parents because he allegedly did not support bilingual programs and was “not bilingual” himself. Norman Bernstein said he was beaten unconscious at the school by two men, at least one a Latino, who addressed him as “white principal” and told him, “We don’t want you here anymore.”

Driven largely by immigration, the nation’s growing Hispanic population appears destined to overtake blacks as the largest minority within the next several years, and Spanish is steadily gaining a foothold in places unaccustomed to foreign languages. Although previous waves of newcomers sought to maintain their linguistic identities, the Hispanic immigrant population differs from them in its sheer size, its heavy concentration in certain states, its proximity to countries of origin and its continual replenishment by new arrivals who perpetuate the language and culture of the homeland.

For these reasons, many language experts and other observers see the United States gradually becoming a more bilingual country.

“That’s eventually where we’re going to have to go as a nation,” said Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), a former Border Patrol chief in El Paso who worked on the southwestern border for 26 years. It is a path that already has been charted in the region bordering Mexico, where bilingualism has taken hold and most people recognize the value of knowing both English and Spanish.

“If people want to see what the country is eventually going to look like, they should come to the border,” Reyes said.

In places like Dalton, however, people do not really need to take up Reyes’s invitation; the border is coming to them.

According to the Rev. Daniel Stack, a Roman Catholic priest here and member of the Georgia Project committee, the first Hispanic settlers began moving to this area in the 1970s, when a labor contractor brought in Mexican workers from Texas to help build a nearby dam. Some subsequently sought jobs in Dalton’s carpet industry, while others went to work in Georgia’s chicken processing plants. Word of the jobs spread, and more Mexicans — mostly single young men — began migrating here to fill them.

But it was not until the late 1980s, after U.S. government amnesty allowed illegal immigrants to gain legal status and bring in their families, that the major influx started.

“The leadership of the town early on had enough sense to recognize that this population was awfully good for the economy,” Stack said. Indeed, the immigrant workers proved vital to the growth of the Dalton area’s carpet industry, whose production is valued at $ 10 billion a year wholesale and accounts for 70 percent of the carpets made in the United States.

But the influx also had a downside. “The schools really got swamped,” Stack said. “They were not prepared.”

Between 1986 and 1996, Hispanic enrollment grew from less than 1 percent of Dalton’s school population to more than 33 percent. In some elementary schools, three-quarters of the students were Hispanic, and most spoke little or no English. Teachers were overwhelmed as they tried to get through to the children in a language that most of them did not understand.

Today, Hispanics make up 41.5 percent of Dalton’s enrollment. Non-Hispanic whites account for 44.5 percent, and blacks and Asians make up the rest.

“Everybody was losing,” Mitchell said. “The teachers were frustrated, the Hispanics were bored, and the English-speaking students were neglected.” In a 1996 letter to the State Board of Education, he wrote, “The solution, for the benefit of all children, is staffing our schools with bilingual instructors.”

Mitchell and other civic leaders struck a deal with the University of Monterrey in northern Mexico to send graduates to the Dalton area as teacher assistants under temporary work visas. Initially, a dozen Mexican teachers came in for the 1997-98 school year. This year, 17 are assigned to schools in and around Dalton.

At the same time, Dalton began sending American teachers to Monterrey for intensive summer classes in Spanish and Mexican culture. The city school system also offered optional Spanish classes to English-speaking children in kindergarten through third grade and made plans to add a grade every year, with the goal of eventually enabling students to take Spanish all through elementary, middle and high school.

A main consideration in designing the bilingual program, a Georgia Project brochure said, was to avoid “the regrettable yet frequent mistake made in numerous schools throughout the world: to place languages in competition, as if one were a more legitimate human communication vehicle.”

Still, “our main objective is to teach English” to the Hispanics, said Diaz, the coordinator of the current crop of Monterrey teachers. “We try to work with them in small groups. The [American] teachers say they see a lot of improvement.” She cited the case of one Mexican fourth-grader, the son of carpet mill workers who arrived last spring.

“He didn’t know how to read or write, even in Spanish,” Diaz said. “I worked with him first in Spanish — in math and language. . . . We’re very proud because now he’s starting to read in English.”

For some of the original Hispanic migrants here, the influx in recent years has had a different effect: It has forced them to improve their Spanish. Such was the case for Elva Acosta, a 26-year-old Mexican American who grew up in Dalton and now heads a community center for Latinos.

“The only reason we learned Spanish was because we had our parents to speak to,” she said. “Home was like a different world.” She spoke English to her siblings and to her friends in school.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t speak it that well,” Acosta said. “I wasn’t educated in Spanish. My Spanish started to improve as more and more relatives started moving here. I taught myself to read Spanish at the age of 12. I took Spanish in high school to improve my grammar. Because of the influx here, I became more fluent.”

Jesus Perez, left, and Tyler Morales work on English sounds with Georgia Project teacher Diana Perez at Dalton’s Roan School. The project encourages all students, including non-Hispanics, to become fluent in English and Spanish.



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