Resettling the West

Segment: Educating children

Narrator: Educating children with little or no English is expensive and challenging. And has had a huge impact on schools in Jackson. Ironically, the cost of living in Jackson for once has benefited the school district. Since many Mexican families cannot afford to live in Jackson, they live in the Idaho communities on the other side of Teton Pass. Primary schools in Victor and Driggs, Idaho are now 20-50% Hispanic and it is Idaho that bears the added cost of educating the children of Jackson workers with limited or no English.

Judy Blair: The Hispanics became important to Jackson as service people for the restaurants and for the hotels. So now, most of our Hispanic population, especially the ones who live in Driggs, work in Jackson, and it's a challenge for us because we have to teach them English and then we have to teach them to read and write. Everybody just jumped on the bandwagon and I said, "I have a problem, I have all these non-English speakers, my teachers don't know what to do," and so we sat down and we brainstormed. We hired an ESL teacher, she is only an aide, so she's been wonderful because her philosophy is that if they are going to be in our country, then they need to learn about our culture and learn about how we do things and they need to be a part of us.

Esteban Garcia: The schools are great, I think. They are the greatest and of course down in Mexico, we don't have the kind of schools that we have right here. My daughter is doing great, the kind of reports that we receive, they say a lot about my daughter and also the teachers say that she is great, that she is reading, that we need to keep going with her because she is great.

Triny Lopez: I am very satisfied with the schools, not that everything is perfect. One of my children has a learning disability. The teachers such as Mrs. Calabri help him out a lot. We don't have the sort of extra help in Mexico for our children.

Maria Medellin: Sometimes we have conferences with the teachers about the children's schoolwork, how they are doing, how they are behaving. The teachers treat me very well.

Narrator: In Cheyenne, where there are large numbers of immigrant children entering school with little or no English, the Hispanic Organization for Progress and Education or HOPE acknowledges children who have overcome language difficulties in schools and Head Start programs. Head Start now educates more than 300 four-year-old Hispanic children in Wyoming including more than 100 who enter the program speaking little or no English.

June Privitt: They are at a very good time in their lives when they're with Head Start at ages 3 and 4 to learn another language. This is just a perfect time for them to learn a language. We try to help them feel comfortable with having things in the classroom that are perhaps from their culture. We do a home visit with all Head Start families. When we go to a home visit where the family does not speak English, we take an interpreter with us.

Interpreter: "He said that all he is asking of you from Sarah is that you be patient with her in Head Start because she doesn't talk English."

Narrator: School districts around Wyoming struggle to meet the needs of children with limited or no English. These children now number more than 2000 in the states.

Carol Mawford: Each year, we collect statistical evidence from our school districts and our latest data that we've looked at from 1998 - 1999 indicated that 2.45% of the student population in Wyoming was of limited or no English.

Natasha Lavroushin: The phenomenon is very, very new. I think the school district is doing a really good job of just dealing with these kids who are real different because of language reasons from all the other kids.

Narrator: Natasha is one of three English as a Second Language teachers at Jackson Elementary School where 63 students receive special instruction.

Natasha Lavroushin: Staffing is a big, big problem because of the salaries that are offered in Wyoming. It is hard to recruit people to come to Wyoming to do ESL.

Amie Cornell: I teach 8 kindergarteners and one first-grader. One had limited English skills when she started but the rest were non-English speakers. They've come a long way in nine weeks. We use thematic uniques and stories that they are familiar with like "The Three Little Pigs," "Three Bears" that they have had in their own country and then I pull out the vocabulary that they would use in everyday like "pig" and "build" and things like that.

Narrator: But school officials in Evanston found the specialized instruction too expensive. Once the children complete kindergarten, they are taught in regular classrooms with some special one-to-one help.

Amie Cornell: All kids that have limited English efficiency should be taught at least three years coming out and working with the vocabulary from the programs that they use in the classroom. All the ESL kids, that would be limited English speakers, are being taught in the classroom using myself and my aide, Patricia, and they don't come out anymore for intensive instruction. The district didn't want to finance it anymore.

Richard Baker: Schools have done some notoriously bad things with minority students and with Mexican students with limited English. They've put them in special education where they don't belong, they put them in remedial classes where they don't belong and they find other sorts of alternatives. They sometimes perceive them as being discipline problems.

Amie Cornell: There are students that for some reason may fail in a certain subject where the limited English-speaking kids, the only disadvantage they have is they don't speak English so I don't think that the two should be categorized together because it's two different needs of instruction.

Narrator: Most state aid for students with limited English skills goes to schools on the Wind River Indian reservation. But some extra state funding, nearly $1000 per student is directed to Wyoming school districts that have large numbers of non-English speaking children.

Senator Irene Devin: I would certainly hope that they would address the problem of limited English speaking students with this money but there is not at this point a legal obligation for them to do that.

Marc McClanahan: If a school district sees the need to provide additional resources for students who had limited English proficiency, there are really only two options. One of them is for the school district to redirect some of its resources or the second option would be for the state to provide more. The state will probably say we'll give you a block grant and it's a local determination about how you spend that money.

Annette Bohling: Well, in Wyoming, we are a very rural state with schools, very small numbers. And so what happens is when you have a family move in that does have children with limited English or no English in some cases, the schools do the best they can to provide English as a second language.

Narrator: Wyoming has a poor historical record of educated Hispanics. A high drop-out rate for Hispanics who have been here for generations does not bode well for new arrivals.

Annette Bohling: According to our latest data collection which is the '98-'99 school year, we do have in Wyoming in grades 9 through 12, a dropout rate of 5%. It is interesting to note that our Hispanic population, all of our Hispanic students, we do have an 11.5% dropout rate which is a little more than twice the rate of the non-Hispanic.

Anne Gardetto: If you look at the high Hispanic dropout rate for children of families who have lived here for years, then it's not really expected that the experience for newly arrived immigrants is going to fare much better.