School Board to Discuss Orientation Plan : Center for Immigrant Students Weighed

The Glendale School Board next week will consider establishing an orientation center for immigrant children entering the school system.

The center would coordinate evaluation and registration of a growing number of students who speak limited English. It would be staffed with English-speaking teachers’ aides who speak Vietnamese, Tagalog--the native language of the Philippines--Armenian, Korean or Spanish.

More than 1,250 children who spoke little or no English enrolled in Glendale schools last year, said Alice Petrossian, director of intercultural education.

“We think it will cut down on the amount of paper work that we do here and make it possible to get the kids into the classes faster,” said Ruth Wilson, principal of Woodrow Wilson Junior High School. “Not having bilingual people here, not having the facilities to handle all the people coming in or staff trained to do that, all those things have made it hard to start educating those kids,” she said.

Would Begin Aug. 29

If the board approves the center, to be at district headquarters at 223 N. Jackson St. and overseen there by the district’s Intercultural Affairs Office, it will start operating Aug. 29, in time to process students enrolling for the new school year.

District officials said the center at first would serve only secondary-school students. Although only half as many students with limited English enrolled in the district’s secondary schools as in its elementary schools last year, the district chose to limit the center to secondary-school enrollees because the process of testing those students is more complex, officials said.

To staff the center, which will be financed through two federal grants, is expected to cost more than $50,000 annually. It will be stocked with informational materials for parents and children on how the school system works and where to go with questions.

Petrossian said the district may produce informative videotapes in various languages for parents to view while their children are processed.

In seeking to establish a central orientation center for new immi-

grant students, the school district is following the lead of three other Los Angeles County school districts and many more throughout the state.

L.A., Long Beach, Alhambra

This summer, the Los Angeles Unified School District established a similar but more comprehensive center expected to process about 6,000 students a year.

The Los Angeles center will offer health screenings, immunizations and referrals to mental health services in addition to evaluating students’ academic status. Public school districts in Long Beach and Alhambra also have established orientation centers in the past few years.