School District Gets Jump in Producing Amnesty Material

A San Gabriel Valley school district has become what some educators say is the first in the country to publish and sell instructional material for immigrants seeking residency under the new amnesty law.

The Hacienda La Puente Unified School District has so far sold 20,000 of the workbooks and teacher guides to more than 100 other school systems in 22 states. Schools throughout the Southland--including some in the Los Angeles Unified School District--and as far away as Florida, are customers.

“If we’d have waited for money and advice from the government, it would have been too late to do anything,” said Thomas Johnson, Hacienda La Puente’s assistant superintendent for adult and community education. The district, which serves 23,000 students in Hacienda Heights, La Puente, the City of Industry and Valinda, is already teaching more than 500 people who have applied for amnesty and want to fulfill requirements for permanent residency.

School officials complain that the federal government has lagged in providing guidelines and materials with which to teach the courses. The federal Immigration and Naturalization Service acknowledges that it is not meeting schools’ needs for the materials. While the INS may have some literature ready in the fall, the agency agrees with many educators that its material will be too advanced to teach the vast majority of residency applicants, who speak little or no English.

“It’ll be near impossible to use the federal text,” acknowledged Gene Pyeatt, INS deputy district director for legalization. “A great percentage of the applicants are even illiterate in their own language.”

Immigrants are eligible to apply for permanent residency 18 months after requesting amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

To be granted residency, the immigrants must either pass a citizenship test or show proof that they have completed at least half of a prescribed 60-hour course in English, U.S. history and government, considered evidence of a sincere effort to learn the language and ways of the United States. The amnesty courses are geared toward students who speak little or no English. They are intended to bolster language skills, while covering U.S. government and history from Christopher Columbus to the Vietnam War.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest district in the state, has 33,774 students enrolled in 966 amnesty classes, said Domingo Rodriguez, the district’s amnesty supervisor. At least two-thirds are starting at the lowest level of language ability, and at least 25% cannot read any language.

The Los Angeles district will have its own course books ready in July. But in the meantime, some district schools are using Hacienda La Puente’s texts.

Hacienda La Puente charges just enough to recoup the district’s initial outlay of $75,000 to write and print the first 20,000 copies, according to teacher Carolyn Collins, who co-authored the booklets and has helped sell them throughout the country.

Costs are held to about $3 a copy by printing on newsprint with a minimum of fancy detail. The district has ordered another 20,000 copies from its printer and plans to sell those at the same price.

The intermediate-level workbooks produced by Hacienda La Puente were written in 10 weeks so that they could be evaluated and ready for use this summer.

Following is an example of the basic information the workbooks contain: “Before 1492, people in Europe did not know America was here. Europeans traded with China and India. They wanted to find a fast, cheap, safe route to the Far East by water.”

Another workbook, called “First Steps to a New Nation,” asks such questions as, “Why did the English people come to America?”

“Right now we have 3,000 amnesty students without even advertising that we’re offering the classes,” said Walter Popkin, director of adult education for the Montebello School District, which is using Hacienda La Puente’s course materials. “We’re taking more students as quickly as we can get credentialed teachers to teach them.”

At Hacienda La Puente’s Fairgrove Adult School one recent morning, Cristobal Medina, 44, was reading one of the district’s workbooks.

“For many years it has been fine,” said Medina, who has lived here without residency status for 17 years. “But it’s good now to learn about the United States. It’s good for me.”