MOORPARK : Spanish Different to Bilingual Teacher

Moorpark teacher Wilda Acevedo said she knew Ventura County would be different from her native Puerto Rico. But she didn’t expect that even the Spanish spoken here would be unfamiliar.

Acevedo, 41, and her family pulled up stakes in Puerto Rico last month so she could take a job teaching bilingual studies at Chaparral Middle School.

Acevedo, who taught English at a community college in San Juan, got the Moorpark job last spring. Moorpark school officials had gone on a recruiting trip to Puerto Rico to help make up for the dearth of qualified bilingual teachers in California.

Acevedo said she was surprised during the first week of school to hear her seventh- and eighth-grade Mexican-American students use expressions that she didn’t recognize.

“Sometimes they say things--it’s almost like a different language,” Acevedo said. “It can be shocking, especially at the beginning.”

Acevedo said she had never heard some of the things that the students call each other, such as chaparrita .

“I guess that refers to a . . . small female,” she said.

Acevedo said her father was a U.S. Army sergeant, and the family spent time at military bases in Missouri and New York. But Acevedo said she had not traveled for some time, and had never been to California.

“The scenery is so different,” she said. “In Puerto Rico, it’s just concrete. Here, you see nature.

“It’s not that things are so negative in Puerto Rico,” she said. But here, “I really like what I see when I ride down the street.”

Acevedo, her husband, their 10-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son are sharing one room in a Thousand Oaks motel while they look for a home.

Even before Acevedo got the teaching job, the family wanted to come here because of the poor condition of Puerto Rico’s economy, she said. The higher standard of living here is apparent in the schools, Acevedo said.

“What really stands out is all the services for the students,” she said, including up-to-date textbooks, counseling, physical education and school cafeterias.

In addition, teachers are paid much better here. “A starting teacher at a public school in Puerto Rico would earn about $12,000,” she said.