[lg policy] Illinois: U46 trial resumes, claims district pushed English Language Learners out of program

[Harold Schiffman]

U46 trial resumes, claims district pushed English Language Learners
out of program

By Emily McFarlan emcfarlan at stmedianetwork.com October 17, 2011 8:20PM



Updated: October 18, 2011 2:17AM


CHICAGO — Dionnes Rivera, then director of bilingual education in
School District U46, had one meeting with Superintendent Connie Neale
shortly after Neale joined the Elgin school district in 2002.  “I went
home crying. I could imagine the impact on the kids’ lives,” Rivera
said.

Rivera said Monday the former superintendent had directed her to
remove all U46 students from the English Language Learners program
after they’d spent three years in it. That testimony came as the
plaintiffs’ evidence in phases two and three of the racial
discrimination lawsuit against U46 started in the U.S. District Court
for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago. These phases allege
the district did not offer appropriate help to English Language
Learners or access to gifted and advanced programs to Hispanic and
black students.

Judge Robert W. Gettleman heard phase one, which alleged the Elgin
school district’s 2004 school boundary plan discriminated against
Hispanic and black students by placing them in overcrowded schools, in
March. He declined to rule on that phase until he’d heard the rest of
the case.

“The reason we’re here today is because of the overlap of these
issues,” Gettleman said.

When Rivera, who retired from U46 in 2007, started as assistant
director of bilingual education in the district in 1990, she said, it
used a “late exit” model for its required transitional bilingual
education program. That model taught core content to students in their
first language, along with English as a Second Language, she
explained.

Students gradually left the program, joining regular classrooms at
their home schools, once they tested proficient (50 percent or higher)
on an English proficiency exam, she said. And, Rivera said, “The
program was working.”

As director of the program, she said, in the 2002-03 school year, she
“started to look at the program under the law and make it public so
that we could make changes to make it better.”

But when Rivera was called to Neale’s office, it wasn’t in response to
that report, she said. It was to be told by the superintendent every
ELL student who had been in the program three or more years had to be
put in regular classrooms.

That’s something the former director said she considered “a violation
of their right to be in the program — a violation of the law, really.”
Research shows it takes five to seven years for a child to become
proficient in a second language, she said.

In February 2003, the U46 Board of Education adopted a policy to have
all ELL students leave the program after five years, according to
Stewart Weltman of plaintiffs’ attorney Futterman Howard Ashley &
Weltman, and Rivera said the first group left at the end of the
2002-03 school year. Office staff and teacher’s assistants were
“eliminated little by little” by budget cuts, most full-day
kindergarten classes were reduced to half days and principals hired
many teachers who were not certified to teach in a bilingual
classroom, she added.

Meantime, she said, the number of ELL students in the district was increasing.

Neale, who appeared Monday as a witness in the trial, remembered her
meeting with Rivera and the school board decision differently. “That
wasn’t a program. That was a strategy,” she said.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act just had been passed, she said,
and “the federal law said after three years, you have to take the
(standardized) test in English. We were looking at making our programs
as strong as possible so our children would be successful.”

Rivera also expressed concern Monday that U46 students in the
elementary or middle-school Spanish English Transition School Within A
School program, a gifted program for students who had left the ELL
program, “were not making it into the high school gifted program.”

In the 2006-07 school year, Elgin High School’s gifted program was 72
percent white, 12 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black, Weltman said.
Meantime, the district as a whole was 42.7 percent white, 41 percent
Hispanic and 6.8 percent white, he added.

During the cross-examination of Rivera by Michael Hernandez of
Franczek Radelet, representing U46, the former director admitted state
law required only that ELL students receive special programming for
three years, or whenever a student is considered proficient in
English. That cross-examination is expected to continue Tuesday.

http://couriernews.suntimes.com/news/8262715-418/u46-trial-resumes-claims-district-pushed-english-language-learners-out-of-program.html

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents.
Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal,
and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message.
 A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well.  (H. Schiffman,
Moderator)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list