CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : MERCED : District May Train Refugees as Teachers

With Southeast Asian refugee children crowding their classrooms, Merced City Elementary School District officials are considering a plan to help pay for training Hmong and Laotian refugees to become teachers. Officials said they need at least 85 bilingual instructors to work with Southeast Asian students, and the only way they can see to get them is to train some of the adult refugees. A survey last October showed that 24% of the 10,600 students in the district are Asian. About 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees, most of them Hmong, live in Merced County, mostly in the city of Merced. The county has the highest refugee population per capita in the nation. The district now does not have any teachers who speak Southeast Asian languages.