Trustees OK End to Bilingual Studies

ORANGE —  All bilingual education would be dropped in the Orange Unified School District if the state approves, under a final vote Thursday night by the school board.

Although hundreds of parents and teachers poured into the meeting to protest the plan, trustees voted to seek state approval to become the largest district in the state to scrap bilingual education.

The board also was expected to vote late Thursday whether to support Jordan Elementary School’s plan to become a charter school. If that action is approved by the state, Orange would be home to both of Orange County’s charter schools, which operate autonomously.

Under the English immersion plan being submitted to the state, the Spanish-language instruction now provided to about 1,200 children in kindergarten through third grade would cease. Special classes would be offered before and after school, and during the summer, to help foreign-speaking students with their English.

The district’s 28,000 students include 4,700 who speak little or no English. The vast majority of those, 4,200, are Spanish speakers, according to school records.

Latino activists said before the meeting that they did not expect to change any votes on the school board. But they wanted to let the community know that they feel they have been cut out of the decision-making process and believe they should be able to choose to place their children in bilingual classes.

“It’s real important that the community understand what’s happening,” said Celso Rodriguez, a bilingual resource teacher at Jordan Elementary. “Parents have been disenfranchised from the situation.”

The activists vowed to carry their fight to the state, which must grant the waiver, and possibly even to the courts.

Board members repeated the arguments they made last month that scrapping bilingual education was in the best interest of the children.

Total immersion in English will help students become fluent more quickly and give them a better foundation for entering the American workplace, said Trustee Robert H. Viviano, the lead proponent for dropping bilingual education.

Viviano was also the most vocal opponent of Jordan Elementary’s plan to become a charter school. The possibility that the school’s 13-member board of directors could vote to reinstate bilingual education bothered him, he said.

He had joined five of his trustees in approving a charter for Santiago Middle School two years ago and applauded that school’s administrators for seeking autonomy from the state’s Education Code. Charter schools are allowed to operate under their own boards of education.

To become charter schools, campuses must first receive approval from their boards of education.

But the issue of bilingual education became a sticking point for some of the trustees.

The proposed charter notes that 87% of Jordan’s 600 students come from homes with limited English. Literacy and learning skills will be the school’s top priorities, the document says.

Jordan Principal Kit Dameron said the timing of the charter proposal was a coincidence and that the school would never write adherence to bilingual education into its charter.