Immigrant Students Catch On Fast to New School’s Mysteries

‘These kids are amazing. They take to school like there’s nothing to it.’

--Teacher Bruce Stohl

On her 14th birthday on Wednesday, America Ramirez put on her tennis shoes, her pink nail polish and a sparkling set of earrings--and entered a difficult new phase of her life.

Only two months after leaving Mexico City, she toted her bright yellow “Peanuts” lunch pail through the gates of Thomas Starr King Junior High School in Hollywood to spend her first day of school in a new country.

With nearly 590,000 other students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Ramirez began the annual task of getting to know new teachers, new classrooms and new expectations--but with the added burdens of speaking no English and having no friends. It is a common predicament at schools such as King, where heavy immigrant enrollment has created a campus where more than 25 languages are spoken.

District administrators, who once projected rapidly increasing enrollments because of Los Angeles’ status as an immigration point, are now predicting that districtwide attendance will remain roughly equal to last year’s or even decline slightly because of the new federal immigration law. Some immigrant families may keep their children from attending school because they fear--incorrectly--that government officials will have them deported, administrators said they believe.

But at King, there is no apparent shortage. More than 80% of the roughly 2,000 students speak a language other than English in their homes. And about 25% of the enrollment--including students from Cambodia, El Salvador and Soviet Armenia--speak virtually no English at all.

“Some of them barely know how to print their own names,” said Dagoberto Hernandez, who teaches English as a second language to 7th-, 8th- and 9th-grade students who have arrived in the United States, in most cases, during the summer.

Hernandez’s Room 317, decorated with the American flag, a Costa Rican travel poster and a poster of Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona, was the port of entry on Wednesday for America Ramirez and eight other immigrant students, including Levon Nadzharyan, and Khachik Khdrlaryan, both 14, of Soviet Armenia, and Manuel Aquino, 15, of El Salvador.

Look at Magazines

The students spent the first two hours in the room where Hernandez will begin teaching them the rudiments of English. On this day, they merely looked at magazines while Hernandez signed their enrollment slips.

America, armed with her lunch pail and a plastic handbag filled with pens and paper, selected an old Sports Illustrated from a stack of magazines. Levon, a cherub-faced, smiling youth with bushy dark hair, found a National Geographic and opened it to a headline: “Are the Soviets Ahead in Space?”

He kept it there throughout the two hours.

The first-hour bell gave students the chance to go out for a drink. Hernandez held up six fingers: “Six minutes,” he said.

America and Mariana Iniguez, another 9th-grader from Mexico, paired off to talk in Spanish. Levon and Khachik fell into conversation with two other Soviet Armenians from another class who also do not speak English.

A month from now, Hernandez said, such students will completely blend in on campus, wearing stereo headphones, chewing gum, and drawing reprimands for those offenses. It helps that the students in the new-immigrant classes are kept together during each school day, moving from one room to the next as a group.

Near the end of the second hour, the classroom intercom burst into life with an announcement. A few students appeared puzzled, while others seemed oblivious. Hernandez announced the impending mid-morning nutrition break: “Listen, everybody, right now class is going to end. We go here”--he gestured down the hall--”to eat.” He made an eating motion with his hand.

This time the students seemed to understand. At the bell, they poured into the hall, flowing down three flights of steps toward the crowded cafeteria.

America avoided the crowds, sitting with her new friends. Levon braved the lines, watching others cut in front of him, for two cartons of milk and a burrito. He and Khachik shared a bench in the sun, appearing no different from the hundreds of other students around the courtyard.

At the next bell, math instructor Bruce Stohl welcomed the group to an empty room brightened by colored geometric artwork. Stepping to an overhead projector, Stohl wrote a pair of equations--”2 plus 2 equals 4,” “5 times 3 equals 15”--to illustrate the point of the class. Stohl then passed out sheets of paper containing a hidden-word game, a chance for students to search among rows of letters for a list of common words and names. The instructor illustrated the concept on the projector.

America started fast, finding six or seven words. Levon sat, baffled, twirling his pencil. Stohl stopped at his desk and showed him again.

“These kids are amazing,” Stohl said. “They take to school like there’s nothing to it.”

Levon found six more words. America, meanwhile, raced through the entire list of 34.

“You got them all?” Stohl whistled aloud. “Bueno. Good job. You want another one?”

Stohl dismissed the class by row. Levon was the last to leave the class.

He also was late in finding the next class, fourth-period gym, the final hurdle before lunch. More than 200 boys sat in rows in the gym.

“OK, let’s go!” a coach yelled into a public address microphone.

Roll was being taken as Levon and Khachik walked in two minutes later. They stood in the middle of the basketball court, wondering where to line up. Confused, they left the gym, but returned quickly, picked a row and sat down.

By then, their smiles were surfacing more frequently. America was at home in her own gym class. A coach found Levon’s enrollment slip and signed it. They seemed to be making it through Day One.

The bell rang again--lunch time--and Levon quickly conquered his last important challenge of the day. He found the bathroom.