Commentary : Santa Ana Schools Meet Challenge of Ethnically Varied Student Body

There’s a new student to be educated in the 21st Century.

As superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District, I see evidence daily of the increasing number of Hispanic and other minority students enrolling in Southern California schools.

With approximately 43,000 students, Santa Ana Unified is the largest school district in Orange County and the ninth largest in the state. Seventy-eight percent of our students are Hispanic and an additional 11% are from Pacific Rim countries. Approximately 56% of our students are classified as limited English proficient (LEP). Students in our district speak nearly 40 languages and dialects.

In addition to the many countries and languages they represent, they also bring varying goals and values into our system. Children from Central America, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos know the horrors of war. Besides teaching the educational essentials, we must also teach them democracy.

The challenge of the 21st Century is to acculturate this diversity into a cohesive, cooperative student population. Because SAUSD has had to face these challenges before some of our neighbors, we may have reached some conclusions or tried some alternatives that could be useful to others.

We must take a serious look at what we’re doing to equip our teacher corps. Our active relationships with UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Chapman College and Rancho Santiago College allow us to collaborate on a number of activities that benefit their students and ours. For example, As part of the focus on teacher training, our director of Bilingual/English as a Second Language program makes presentations to UCI teacher trainees about the realities of teaching in today’s multicultural schools, and part of our cooperative efforts with Rancho Santiago allows prospective teachers hands-on opportunities at one of our elementary schools.

SAUSD offers free cultural awareness and Spanish-language training for teachers in addition to continuing staff development.

Hispanic families and others who have immigrated to this country have done so to find a better life and success. Whatever our feelings about the numbers of immigrants coming to our shores, it is our job to educate the children of our communities and to help them become successful.

To achieve that goal, I tell students that they must first learn English and that education must be their No. 1 priority. In my outreach to our Hispanic families, my repeated message is that the key to a brighter future for their children is education.

Santa Ana Unified is also in the process of hiring a community liaison to involve our total community in supporting the education system. We have a very strong parent group--Padres Unidos--at Madison Elementary, and we want to have this kind of involvement at each school so that all our parents can have input into their children’s education.

In collaboration with Cal State Fullerton, we offer Family Math for elementary school parents. This program allows parents and children to come into the schools at night and learn, in their native language, about the math program their children are studying and about how they can help at home.

SAUSD is also developing a videotape to help parents understand how they may become involved at school, how to check their children’s progress with teachers and what social services are available to them.

To help non-English-speaking students and their families in their transition into our district, we have developed a Registration and Testing Center to assess students’ language and educational abilities and to offer parents a choice of English-acquisition programs. This centralized facility also takes the burden of testing and processing new students off the individual school sites. From July through December, more than 3,000 students were served by the center.

On school campuses we have instituted newcomer (at elementary) and EASE (at secondary) classes to help students prepare for the regular classroom. They receive instruction in emergency English skills, learn procedures for getting lunch and supplies and become familiar with the campus and its rules.

These responsibilities, too, were once handled in individual classrooms as new students registered throughout the year.

Many of our students’ needs are great. It is not unusual for our district to receive new, young students who do not know how to hold a crayon or who can not even name their colors. We frequently receive high-school-age students who not only do not speak English, but who also are illiterate in their native language.

Many of this district’s top students, along with students from UCI and Rancho Santiago, are involved in after-school tutoring. The YMCA this spring will begin an after-school program in our district, and we have been guaranteed funding to begin a school readiness program next fall. Children as young as 3 will take part in this effort to help them enter school on equal footing with their peers.

And we must continue to re-examine our efforts. A year ago, we put together a task force to study our services to limited-English-speaking students. They came back with more than 50 recommendations we are now addressing.

As an example, through the efforts of our director of secondary curriculum, the UC system has agreed that all LEP or bilingual content area courses are acceptable for their entry requirements, as are their English-only counterparts. LEP algebra I would be viewed no differently than the standard algebra I.

SAT preparation courses are offered free in summer school, and we’ve increased the number of students continuing their education after graduation. Nearly 80% of our graduates pursue some form of higher education. Last year UCI did a transcript survey and determined that 23% of our seniors were qualified for UC schools. That number is up from 18% from the previous year.

Turning Point, Peer Assistance, Neighborhoods in Action are all a part of our total community approach to communicating with and helping our students and their families. We recently produced our first bilingual newsletter, and our cable TV bulletin board now offers messages in Spanish as well as English. The Board of Education believes that it is our responsibility to communicate with the community we serve.

Serving the divergent needs of the new California student is a difficult challenge, but I don’t believe we’re going to lose this war. It will take time, but I see a ray of hope. Santa Ana is not sitting back passively.