Hispanic influx tests schools

Teachers fluent in Spanish are hot commodity

You might be pleased and proud to be able to speak Spanish as well as Engracio Enriquez speaks English.

Yet the Mexican-born teacher’s aide still often struggles to translate some classroom lectures into Spanish for her non-English-speaking clients at Green Bay East High School.

“In consumer mechanics, they’re learning the basic skills so they can give maintenance to a car, and it’s a challenge, because I’m not familiar with some of these terms even in Spanish,” Enriquez said. “And we have biology, math, government …”

Consider her struggle as a symbol of the struggle of the entire Green Bay School District – and, therefore, of the entire community – to come to grips with the staggering influx of Hispanics to this area.

Brown County’s Hispanic population was 1,525 in 1990. It climbed 470 percent since then, to 8,698, according to the U.S. Census.

Nearly 90 percent of those Hispanics settled into Green Bay, and more than 60 percent of them squeezed into eight census tracts on the city’s east side.

At the start of this school year, that meant 1,625 Hispanic students injected into the Green Bay school system, with two-thirds of them having limited or no English skills.

And more are on the way. The census indicates 2,811 Hispanics under age 18 in Green Bay, which means many who are still pre-school age.

And the census didn’t get everyone.

“I think we got about 90 percent,” said Enriquez, who helped the Census Bureau this summer try to count some of the Hispanic people missed in the official April enumeration.

“And month after month, we learn about new people coming in,” she said.

The language struggles of the newcomers are posing serious challenges to Green Bay educators.

The area school system is no newcomer to the task of having to provide English as a Second Language classes.

“The Hmong population – that’s been almost 25 years now,” said Fay Boerschinger, coordinator of the English as a Second Language and Bilingual programs for the district.”We do have a few coming through immigration that are new to English, but not in the numbers that we used to.”

But the Hispanics already are close to doubling the number of Southeast Asians in the community, and, for the first time this school year, they outnumber the Hmong in needing language help in school.

That puts Green Bay in stiff competition with Milwaukee and other areas of the country for scarce bilingual teachers and aides.

“Spanish bilingual teachers are extremely difficult to find,” Boerschinger said. “It has to be a certified teacher who is also very proficient in Spanish. We’ve worked really hard, and lots that we have are under emergency licenses, because it’s so difficult to find someone with everything.”

School districts are required to provide education for everyone, and that means teaching Hispanics to speak English even as they are learning science, math and other subjects, said Dan Nerad, the Green Bay district’s assistant superintendent.

That means the district must rise to the occasion in the face of decreasing state aids and more than a 500 percent increase in its budget for ESL and bilingual programs since 1990.

“Children have a right to public education,” Nerad said. “Having said that, do we not want them all to be as successful as possible?

“The last thing we want to see is a population of our kids, recognizing that it includes a growing minority population, coming out of school without the necessary skills to get jobs, because those are the people that are going to take care of our community.”



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