Groups Lose Demand for Mandatory English Class

School districts are not required by law to provide English classes to all non-English-speaking adults who want to take them, a Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday in a suit that sought to force the Los Angeles Unified School District to provide more classes.

The suit, filed in mid-October by several public interest law groups, was brought after the waiting list to enroll in English classes in the district reached an all-time high of about 40,000 last year.

“I don’t doubt that there is a substantial need,” Superior Court Judge Jerry Fields said. But he disagreed that state law requires that English classes must be provided any time 20 eligible adults sign up for a class, as was argued by Carmen Estrada, a lawyer with the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

The suit was filed because of the “tremendous” need for English classes in a district experiencing one of the largest influxes of immigrants in the nation, Estrada said. The waiting list for English classes in the district last year was twice as long as the previous year. And this year, only four months into the school year, the number has already reached 23,000, Estrada said.

‘Double Message’

Estrada also said she finds a “double message” in the fact that, in a state where an English-only initiative won voter approval, the school district refuses to offer enough English courses to accommodate adults who want to learn English in order to more easily join the mainstream.

The district maintains that it is doing its best to meet the need. It served nearly 200,000 adults in English classes last year in the largest program of its kind in the nation, according to district spokesman William Rivera.

Currently more than half of the district’s $67-million annual adult education program is devoted to English classes for non-English speakers, he said.

“We are meeting the need to the limits of our finances,” Rivera said. He said that despite a 2% state funding cap on the annual growth of adult education classes, the district’s adult program grew by nearly 10% last year through funding from other sources.