Shift in Ethnic Balance Upsets Anglo Parents

When Richard and Katherine Leslie moved to an older, tree-lined part of Leucadia, they were comforted by the presence just down the block of a neighborhood school--tidy, lushly landscaped, with a view of the ocean and populated by the children of upwardly mobile parents.

What they didn’t know was that, within a few years, a third or more of the students at Capri Elementary would speak primarily Spanish and come not from the new, upscale subdivisions but from low-income Latino families living in an area known locally as Tortilla Flat.

The change at Capri that has upset the Leslies and a number of other Anglo parents occurred last spring when the Encinitas elementary school district opened a new school in far-off La Costa, at the outermost boundary of the district.

A New Visibility

Five-hundred students from La Costa--virtually all of them Anglo--were shifted from Capri to the new school, dropping Capri’s enrollment from approximately 1,000 to 500. The number of Latinos enrolled at Capri remained unchanged, but suddenly they made up a significantly larger percentage of the student body.

With that new visibility and prominence came a reaction from some Anglo parents.

The Leslies and others are now worried that the education of Anglo children will suffer as many teachers are required to teach bilingually and cater to Latino students who need special attention to overcome the daunting barriers of language and culture.

In effect, these parents are crying foul, saying this is not what they bargained for when they saddled themselves with high mortgages and a commuter life style to enjoy a piece of the North County coast.

“When we moved here, one of the real incentives was the school system,” said Richard Leslie, 42, a partner in a San Diego-based medical X-ray firm. “This has been quite a shock. It’s like seeing all your expectations tumble down. We’re considering private school for our son.”

Signs of tension, or at least unease, between the Anglo and Latino populations can be seen throughout North County. But it is in the new city of Encinitas that they are most apparent, probably because of an increasing visibility in recent years of the area’s Latino population, which has strong but heretofore hidden roots in North County.

Lived Here for Decades

That new visibility applies both to the newly arrived migrants looking for work and to the longtime residents of Tortilla Flat, many of whom have lived in the United States for decades but still send their children to school speaking only Spanish.

The most severe reaction by Anglo residents has been prompted by the daily sight of the hundreds of migrants who line Encinitas Boulevard and El Camino Real in the hope of finding labor. A civic task force, amid considerable acrimony, has been studying the issue for more than a year.

When Spanish-language graffiti, often gang-related, spread from Tortilla Flat to the rest of the city, residents battered City Hall into launching a paint and sandblasting war.

The opening of La Costa Heights Elementary School last spring was meant to eliminate crowding at Capri and give the school a more spacious, comfortable feeling, the kind of atmosphere parents and educators alike say is preferable for young children.

The move proved bittersweet to some Anglo parents as the percentage of minority students at Capri rose from 15% to 40% virtually overnight.

But Latino parents say Anglos have no cause to fear the change.

“I don’t think the white parents should be afraid of Spanish-speaking students,” said Esperanza Avila, 25, a widow with two children at Capri. “Their children will still get as much attention. I don’t see any problem.”

Less Disturbing Presence

Students from Tortilla Flat, and a smaller Latino enclave several miles away, have long attended Capri, but their presence was less disturbing to Anglo parents then because they represented a smaller percentage of the enrollment.

“The Hispanic population in Encinitas is really hidden from view in many ways,” said David Walker, 43, a high school English teacher who lives in the $200,000-plus Quail Gardens subdivision and who sends his son to Capri. “People drive out here to look at the new subdivisions, and they don’t really drive the backroads.

“They only see the subdivisions where they want to buy,” Walker said. “The Hispanics don’t live there, so people assume they don’t exist.”

Although Anglo students will continue to be taught exclusively in English and will not be required to learn Spanish, some parents are worried that teachers will be overburdened by large numbers of low-achieving students. Capri test scores are already among the lowest in the district.

Apprehension increased among Capri parents when first-year Principal Nancy Austin recently announced plans to hire more bilingual teachers and to no longer bunch all Spanish-speaking students in separate classes that are on year-round schedules.

Her long-term goal is to achieve an equal representation of Spanish-speaking students in all classes, including those on the traditional September-to-June schedule. Those classes had previously been almost exclusively Anglo because they had no bilingual teachers.

Austin is resolute in her belief that such a move--to be accomplished slowly through attrition and voluntary transfers--is best for both Anglo and Latino students because it provides an integrated education. At the same time, she acknowledges that the change is difficult for some Anglo parents to accept.

“This generation (of parents) that has children in school is used to having a good deal of control over their lives,” Austin said. “They expect it and demand it. That is good in many ways, but it has limits.

“Parents have the right to control whether their child will be taught in Spanish. They do not have the right to control whether other children in the same classroom are taught in Spanish.”

Nestled on a woodsy hillside just east of Interstate 5 and north of Leucadia Boulevard, Capri is an inviting and reassuring-looking school. The lawns and flower beds and grassy playing field are well-manicured; palm trees dot the campus.

Since the opening of La Costa Heights, Capri has only one remaining portable classroom of the type that often gives fast-growing North County schools an unsettled, boom-town look.

Latino and Anglo parents agree on one point: Capri has a reputation as a safe, well-disciplined school with no history of friction or jostling in the classrooms or on the playground because of ethnic or economic differences.

“Friends are friends, regardless of what language they speak,” said Avila.

Still, the changes at Capri have prompted three basic questions from Anglo parents:

- If integration is a noble goal, why not attempt to equalize the minority percentage at all schools, rather than leave Capri at 40%, La Costa Heights at 5%, and the other five schools somewhere in between?

- Will the Encinitas district, which is not among the best-paying and thus has trouble competing for teachers, have to lower its standards to hire bilingual teachers?

- And why can’t the Anglo students, if Spanish is to be spoken in their classrooms, at least receive some Spanish instruction?

On a recent rainy night, a dozen Capri parents came to the ranch-style home of Linda Kaiser to explain their fears about changes that seem beyond their control.

Misunderstood Motives

Kaiser, 46, a psychotherapist who moved to Encinitas a year ago, is the parent of a first-grade student at Capri and has taken the lead in questioning the changes at the school. She said some parents are afraid to speak out for fear of having their motives misunderstood as bigotry.

“My main question is: Why is one school being asked to shoulder the overall community’s burden of illegal aliens?” Kaiser said.

“Why has our school been allowed to become ghettoized?” asked a Capri father.

In fact, the immigration status of Capri students is unknown. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has only recently asked the school for citizenship figures. Many of the Spanish-speaking students come from longtime Encinitas families. Only a handful are from migrant families.

Although apparently no two Anglo parents have exactly the same concerns about the shift at Capri, a common thread is that the changes are threatening to the educational opportunities for their children.

“I believe in an economic and racial mix in the schools,” said Rory Powell, 36, who owns an engineering consulting business and is the mother of two Capri students. “I believe in diversity, and I don’t want to lose that at Capri.

“I want the Spanish-speaking students to get all the help they need, but I do not want my kids to lose the opportunities they’ve had and that we moved here for,” Powell said. “We’ve got very good teachers. Why lose them?”

Glynn Birdwell, 37, a former librarian who will soon have a second child attending Capri, said: “My children’s education is my top priority. Everything else is secondary.”

The concern is not limited to the group that gathered in Kaiser’s living room. A number of like-minded parents were interviewed in Quail Gardens, a new tract in a once-pristine valley between La Costa Avenue and Leucadia Boulevard.

“I suppose my husband and I could be seen as ‘yuppies,’ but we’ve worked very hard and watched our money to get where we are,” said Karol Takeshta, 38, a sergeant in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department who moved to Quail Gardens last year with her husband, Robert, also a sergeant.

“Nothing is more important to us than our children and their education,” she said. “I have no problem with different colors--my husband is Japanese--but I have trouble with any culture that does not stress learning or speaking English. As it stands now, our oldest boy is going to Catholic school as soon as we can get him in.”

Like school officials in several North County districts, Encinitas administrators are grappling to serve two divergent constituencies: one that arrives at school with great needs, the other with great expectations.

The Encinitas policy is to attempt to keep all schools within 15 percentage points of the districtwide average of 16% minority students (three-quarters of whom are Latino). However, no plans exist for busing or boundary changes to shift minority students away from Capri.

“Our plan right now is to sit tight,” said Supt. Donald E. Lindstrom, who has headed the Encinitas Union Elementary School District since 1977. “We’ve been through this before at Capri, in 1979 when we opened Flora Vista.”

Anglo students from families buying homes in three new subdivisions being built around Capri--including Poinsettia Park, directly adjacent to Tortilla Flat--will shift the ethnic balance significantly closer to the district average in three to four years, Lindstrom said. Busing for ethnic balance is out of the question, he added.

“We’ve never, ever considered that,” he said.

Although the name Tortilla Flat, taken from John Steinbeck’s 1935 novel, is commonly used by both Latino and Anglo residents, Lindstrom and Austin decline to use the tag, because they feel it carries a disparaging connotation, a sense of separateness.

But both can readily identify its boundaries--Interstate 5 on the west, the YMCA on the south, Saxony Road on the east and Leucadia Boulevard on the north. The half-dozen streets make up one of the oldest neighborhoods in Encinitas.

“The people in the neighborhood relate to Capri because older children have gone there,” Lindstrom said. “They’re more involved with the school because of that. If we spread them out, we would lose that comfort factor for the parents, and I think that would be a detriment for the students.”

Kim Rietfors, who teaches a combination fourth- and fifth-grade class at Capri, said a major goal at recent parent-teacher conferences was to reassure Anglo parents that their children are not being shortchanged.

She teaches on the year-round schedule and has a bilingual assistant; thus the percentage of minority students in her classroom exceeds Capri’s overall 40% figure.

“They were not thrilled” about the minority percentage, Rietfors said of the parents. “A major job of mine is to show the parents that their children are not being neglected and that their fears are unfounded. It’s not easy, but it can be done.”

Capri uses what in educational jargon is known as a “transitional” approach to teaching Spanish-speaking students.

Teacher Moves Around

Instead of the true bilingual approach in which instruction is given in both languages, Spanish-speaking students in kindergarten and grades 1 and 2 receive their reading and mathematics instruction entirely in Spanish. Their English-speaking classmates are taught solely in English.

Reading and math are often done in small groups, with the teacher moving from group to group. Spanish-speaking and English-speaking students are commonly put in separate groups.

Overall activities--and such things as bulletin board decorations--are in English. The goal is to move the Spanish speakers into English as quickly as possible.

Avila’s children, for example, are moving away from Spanish into English. Although they were born in San Diego, they spoke only Spanish when they enrolled at Capri because their early child care was provided by their grandparents, who have lived in Encinitas for years but retain their native language.

For Spanish-speaking students who enter at third grade or above, instruction is given primarily in English, with additional help provided by either the teacher, if he or she is bilingual, or by a Spanish-speaking instructional aide or student teacher.

Because the English-speaking students are not given instruction in Spanish, a provision in state law allowing parents to remove their children from bilingual classes is not seen as applicable.

Sleight of Hand?

Some Anglo parents lament that their children are not allowed to learn Spanish. Others find the district’s policy a kind of sleight of hand destined to skirt the intent of state law.

“I don’t find it sleight of hand at all,” Austin said. “What we’re doing is following state and federal laws which want us to provide a quality education to all. This option that some parents feel they have does not extend to saying another student cannot be part of a program.”

Nine of 18 teachers at Capri are bilingual, a figure Austin and Lindstrom want to increase to allow more Spanish-speaking students to enroll in the traditional September-to-June schedule. They would also like to offer Spanish to English-speaking students as an optional course.

As Latino percentages increase in schools throughout Southern California, bilingual teachers are in great demand, and lesser-paying districts in expensive areas like Encinitas often lose out in the bidding war for the best candidates.

“We have trouble finding bilingual teachers who meet our specifications,” Lindstrom said. “We won’t hire a teacher just because they’re bilingual. We’d get killed if we did that, from both the parents and the staff.

“We’ve been burned before when we thought we needed bilingual skills rather than quality,” he said. “We’ve had to get rid of some people, and I don’t want to do that again.”

On the state achievement tests last year, Capri had the lowest score in the district on the sixth-grade reading test, and the next-to-lowest in third-grade reading and sixth-grade mathematics. Only in third-grade math did Capri finish in the middle of the pack.

La Costa Heights, by comparison, finished at the top in sixth-grade reading and near the top in the other categories.

“This is not a racial issue, it’s a language issue,” said Capri parent Dellrae Marassi, 43, whose husband owns a firm representing sporting goods manufacturers. “The more students with language difficulties, the more time a teacher must spend with them.”

Lucinda Martinez, 29, who also has a child at Capri, disagrees. She has lived on the North County coast since she was 3, is a medical receptionist, and her husband works as a landscaper in San Marcos.

“The Anglo parents are talking from an adult point of view, not a child’s,” Martinez said. “Children adapt to a different language being spoken next to them. Maybe the Anglo parents should visit our classrooms as a volunteer, like I have.”

Martinez’s son went to Capri speaking mostly Spanish but now is fluent in English.

“I have visited the classrooms, and I’ve never seen that the Mexican children get more attention than the Anglo children,” she said. “Any teacher who would favor one group over another would lose control of the class, and none of the parents want that.”

Principal Austin, 43, who started in the district as a teacher in 1972, remains unflappable despite the controversy stirred by the enrollment shift.

“First, the number of parents who are truly upset is very small,” she said. “Second, I’m very excited and proud of what we can do here at Capri. Education is not dependent on the cost of your house. Our goal is to take those children from $175,000 houses and those from homes with very little and provide a quality education for both.”

But in a number of the heavily landscaped and leveraged homes of Encinitas, parents remain concerned about the prospect of an uncertain future for their children.

“I’m certainly not against change,” said Katherine Leslie, 34, an X-ray technician who works in Vista. “I just feel it’s not an upward movement we’re headed for.”