Column: Immigration from a school perspective
Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost.
– I am and always will be a staunch supporter of legal immigration. My first wife and the mother of my two adult sons was born in Tijuana and came legally to San Diego with her family as a teenager speaking no English. She had been well educated in Mexico and completed her high school education in English, earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from San Diego State, and recently completed a long career as a Physical Education teacher and truant officer in an inner city junior high school in San Diego.
Both of our sons are UC graduates with successful careers and wonderful stable families. In my career as a school administrator, I worked with many similarly successful immigrant students, many of whom of course were not here legally.
I also saw schools and districts at times overwhelmed by the cost of educating both illegal and legal immigrants. I was an English teacher at a high school in Chula Vista before services were mandated to speakers of other languages and had students newly arrived from Mexico who spoke no English, yet sat politely in class daily not understanding much if any of the day’s lesson. I had to give them a grade and that couldn’t be passing, but I felt a great deal of respect for their daily attendance and apparent attentiveness. There had to be a better solution.
In 1974 the Supreme Court in Lau vs Nichols unanimously decided that all children, including those who were not speakers of English, are legally entitled to the same access to the curriculum as English speakers. The case involved children of Chinese ancestry in San Francisco schools. The court also ruled in 1982 ( Plyler vs Doe), in a split decision, that it is unlawful for schools to deny a free public education to any child based on their immigration status, which was not the role of the school to question.
How best to have immigrant children learn English and thereby access fully the curriculum continues to be debated. Dual Immersion programs such as the Georgia Brown model have proven successful. Total immersion, such as High-Intensity Language Training (HILT), where the student is instructed strictly in English with minimal support in their first language, is typically effective for students who are fluent and reading at grade level in their primary language, and whose parents value education and encourage English in the home as well as their primary language.
This isn’t surprising. If a kid knows a skill or concept in their primary language learning it in English is way easier than learning something totally new. In my experience, the quality of the teacher and instructional aides is just as if not more important than the specific program. The effort of the student and the support of parents in learning and speaking English is also critical.
A wide variety of programs to increase the number of English Learners moving from Limited English Proficient (LEP) to Fully English Proficient (FEP) have had various degrees of success. As is the case with any educational program, success largely depends on the willingness of the learners to do their best, a safe environment, the commitment of the teacher to making it work, and the active support of parents.
Many programs are in place to assist students and parents meet that challenge. Providing quality translations to parents to assist them in supporting their children is often difficult, can be politically charged, and can be very expensive as we well know here in Paso. This cost is particularly difficult to defend when the parents have lived here for many years yet still do not speak English.
Extra funding is provided in California to serve students who are in foster care, who are homeless, whose families live in relatively low economic status, and who are learners of English as a Second Language. They are called “unduplicated students,” meaning only that they qualify for the extra approximately two thousand dollars per year in state funds under only one, not multiple categories. Almost two-thirds of students in Paso currently so qualify (not solely language qualifiers), while in schools like San Miguel, it often is well over ninety percent of the student body.
These funds are used to hire bilingual support personnel and provide other extra services to students to accelerate their learning of English and hence move from (LEP) to (FEP). An unfortunately significant percentage of English language learners, whether it be due to lack of effort or ineffective school programs, or both, fail ever to become adequate speakers of English.
One well-intentioned practice that has I believe proven to be misguided is to have LEP students take supplemental English instruction in lieu of electives as they enter secondary schools. While intended to prioritize learning English and be an incentive to try ones hardest, it has precluded students from taking vocational and other electives with practical applications that motivate many students to stay in school and succeed.
The cost of these extra services is immense. Every effort is made to integrate the students into the regular student population as much as possible, but it takes a truly extraordinary classroom teacher to be able to maximize the learning of each student while providing the support mandated for students with Special Education needs as well as English as a Second Language needs. It becomes particularly challenging when the student does not speak English and has a significant learning or physical disability that qualifies them for Special Ed services.
It is doubly difficult when the student’s family doesn’t speak Spanish but instead the indigenous language Mixtecan which many immigrant families in the North County speak. Orally it includes whistles and clicks and in arithmetic doesn’t include a decimal system. The written language is pictographic and there is no alphabet. Finding translators to converse with these families let alone providing an education to these children is a huge challenge.
Often in San Miguel older siblings would translate Mixtecan to Spanish for their parents and school personnel. Providing full opportunities for learning to speakers of English while meeting all of these needs to immigrant children is a monumental challenge and is certainly one factor in the rapid expansion of alternative programs such as home school and charter schools.
No thoughtful person can possibly claim the current immigration system is optimal nor sustainable. We have to find a way to screen those to be legally admitted and to identify those currently here illegally who deserve to be deported. Surely we can find a way to discern fairly who has earned the right to stay from those who have committed felonies or otherwise done nothing positive to contribute to our country and need to be returned to their country of origin.
The current system also makes wealthy the criminals who smuggle them across the border, often in horrific conditions where innocent children are terrorized. A compromise surely can be reached whereby immigrants who have entered illegally with their parents and are now productive, law-abiding citizens need not be deported. Perhaps it is a pathway to legal status but not citizenship.
President Reagan back in 1986 thought such a workable compromise solution had been found, but lack of enforcement led to its failure. Whatever arrangement is reached, this time it must include a way finally to secure the border both to incoming illegal immigrants and drugs and to outgoing weapons.
If no compromise solution is found and the threatened mass deportations come to pass, I can assure you of this simple fact; the effect on school districts will be devastating in terms of human suffering, massive financial shortfalls, layoffs of some our best staff, and the elimination as a result of many popular school programs unrelated to citizenship status.
As a better solution is found and proves enforceable, I at least hope and trust we can agree that children in the short term should not be arrested at schools. There already is more than enough stress over lost learning from COVID-19 and schools locked up for fear of armed intruders. Surely there is an alternative to blanket deportation of all.
– Former Paso Robles Joint Unified School District Superintendent Curt Dubost
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