Schools Offer Extra Instruction to Settle Suit : Education: A judge must approve the plan, which offers Saturday classes for non-English-speaking students allegedly denied immediate enrollment.

School officials have tentatively agreed to offer extra instruction for more than 160 students allegedly denied immediate enrollment into Long Beach schools because of a shortage of bilingual classes.

The agreement, which is scheduled to be presented Monday to a Superior Court judge, would settle a lawsuit charging the Long Beach Unified District with putting many students who don’t speak English on waiting lists instead of in classrooms.

Under the agreement, students would be able to attend four-hour Saturday sessions for 12 consecutive weeks to make up for any lost instruction time, said Jack Alanis, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Long Beach. The suit was filed on behalf of seven children and their parents last year by Legal Aid and another nonprofit organization, Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy Inc. of San Francisco.

The district will also spend $60,000 to enhance programs for students who speak limited English. This money will likely be used to train teachers how to teach non-English speakers more effectively, school officials said. The money will come from district reserves.

In addition, the school system will establish a grievance procedure for parents who feel that the enrollment of their children has been delayed.

Long Beach Unified admits no wrongdoing in the settlement, but Alanis said the agreement is virtually tacit recognition of the lawsuit’s validity.

“The terms of the settlement agreement clearly show that there were problems and that the school district is addressing the needs of the children who were harmed,” Alanis said. He said enrollment was delayed an average of seven school days during the 1990-91 school year for the children identified in the suit.

“The settlement validates our assertions two years ago that there was a waiting list and there was a practice of delaying enrollment of children,” Alanis said.

Although district officials conceded some past inefficiency, they said no student was ever intentionally kept from enrolling.

Students always had an option to enroll in the regular program at their home school while waiting for openings in bilingual programs. Some parents might have held their children out while waiting, said Ted Buckley, the school system’s legal adviser.

“We maintained that the only waiting lists were for admission to special programs. That’s what the waiting list was for,” Buckley said.

The extra classes will be available to students who did not get into the program they wanted right away, Buckley said.

The settlement was criticized by Roberto Uranga, a member of the district’s Hispanic Advisory Committee.

“I think the settlement is a slap on the wrist for the school district,” Uranga said. “You can’t estimate what kind of impact it had on the kids to wait this long, waiting in sub-par facilities, receiving sub-par services. They go into a classroom setting behind their classmates and peers. How do you measure this?”

Uranga said the district sometimes overlooks children who do not speak English because the parents lack the language skills and confidence to complain to school officials.

The real culprit, however, is a shortage of bilingual teachers, the same shortage that also plagues other school districts, said Martha Estrada, who directs the district’s bilingual programs.

Long Beach Unified offers a variety of special programs for recent immigrants and non-English speakers. One of the most popular is the Language and Learning Centers Program, a one-year bilingual program that offers smaller classes and a special curriculum for students who speak little or no English and have little or no prior schooling.

As in other programs for bilingual students, the demand is greater than the capacity, Estrada said. The district has 52 such classes and sometimes must place students who could benefit from the program into other classes.

The district needs about 312 teachers who speak Spanish. It has 79 and is training about 50 more. It also needs about 120 instructors who speak Khmer, a language of Cambodia. The district has no such teachers; five are in training.

About a third of the district’s students have limited English skills. Two thousand such students have arrived at Long Beach schools since March, contributing to a record enrollment of more than 75,000 students.

Education laws require school districts to enroll immediately any students who have obtained the necessary vaccinations and who can prove they live in the district. The district offers same-day registration through its Assignment Center, which has a staff that collectively speaks about 14 languages.

“I don’t think the problem was racism,” Alanis said of the alleged enrollment delay. “It was just an administrative failure.”