They’re Speaking the Same Language : 3 Programs Train Bilingual School Aides to Fill the Need for Spanish-Speaking Teachers

Anna Araya is a bilingual teacher’s aide at Washington Elementary School in Hawthorne, one of thousands of Spanish-speaking helpers that in California’s port-of-entry schools have become as common as computers and crossing guards.

Araya also attends school herself, where she is being trained to become a fully credentialed bilingual teacher. And experts say the 21-year-old Araya and others like her represent the state’s best hope to educate non-English speaking Latino students, one of the most pressing challenges facing California schools.

More than a third of Hawthorne’s 7,000 elementary school students are Latinos who cannot speak English. But the district has only five fully credentialed bilingual teachers--roughly one to every 500 children in need. Statewide, experts say, California’s shortage of bilingual teachers stands at 14,000 and is expected to double by the year 2000, if steps are not taken quickly to train large numbers of Spanish-speaking teachers.

Educators have begun looking to aides such as Araya, who are already working in California classrooms, to meet the demand. Three pioneering teacher-training programs are under way at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, in which Araya and more than 100 other Spanish-speaking aides are participating.

“If we can train teachers more quickly, we can make a dent in the shortage,” said John McGowan, a professor of education at Dominguez Hills who helped start the programs. “(Aides) are ideal candidates for bilingual teachers. . . . So many of them live in the community, they’re good role models for the kids. . . . Another plus is they’ve been in the classroom on the average for five years so they know what it’s like.”

The Dominguez Hills programs--one federal, one state and the third sponsored by the Ford Foundation in conjunction with Los Angeles Unified School District--provide bilingual aides with money for books and tuition. The aides also have access to special classes and tutoring designed to quickly enhance their math and language skills.

More important, program organizers say, they also get close guidance from university professors and counselors.

“That is very important to keeping the (aides) in school,” said McGowan. “We get them over the hurdles. . . . Many of them are first-time college-goers. No one in their family has ever been.”

Indeed, Araya is the first in her family to attend college. Born in Costa Rica, she came to the United States with her parents and older brother when she was 2 months old. The family settled in Inglewood, where Araya went to school. Her father is a truck maintenance worker at Los Angeles International Airport. Her mother works in an electronics assembly plant.

For Araya, the chance to become a full-fledged teacher is a dream come true. Like many in the programs, she has dreamed since childhood of teaching.

“I like knowing that I can help children,” Araya said. “At first they have that fear (of coming from) a Spanish-speaking home into an English-speaking school. I remember when I had to go through it. So I think they feel comfortable to know there’s someone they can talk to.”

Like other aides in the programs who work in area school districts, Araya spends three hours each morning teaching math, reading, history and science to third-grade youngsters who do not yet know enough English to learn in that language.

The story is much the same for Leslie Rosario, a 25-year-old teacher’s aide in a second-grade classroom at Annalee Elementary School in Carson who is also in a Dominguez Hills program.

“I really wanted to be a teacher ever since I was in fourth grade, kind of a little girl’s dream. And the program really gave me the chance I needed,” Rosario said.

A senior at Dominguez Hills, Rosario, 25, plans to stay one more year to study for her teaching credential. Rosario and her husband were born in Puerto Rico, immigrated to Florida and then came to California when the Navy stationed him here.

“I feel that through my schooling I was influenced by a lot of teachers,” Rosario said. “Because of their example they really gave me hope, and I want to do the same thing for these students. I want to work with low-income, disadvantaged students because I feel that one person can really make a difference. I can influence these children to get a career and be successful in life.”

Rosario and her husband, who works for Southern California Gas Co., earn $26,000 annually between them. That is too much for her to qualify for federal or state financial aid programs but not enough to make college an easy financial slide, not when books cost about $250 a semester and fees and tuition add up to $700.

Before she got into the Dominguez Hills programs, Rosario had to take out loans to finance her education. “For a while,” she said, “I didn’t have a car. I had to catch the train and the bus and walk two miles. It was kind of hard, but I hung in there.”

McGowan said of the aides in the programs, “They live on the edge financially.” As aides, they earn only about $4,000 a year.

But their desire, or “ganas” as some of the would-be teachers call it, is great. Just ask the Quezada brothers, Jose, 23, and Cesar, 21, two of the Dominguez program participants.

The sons of Mexican immigrants, their academic prowess became legend at the university. At the same time they were working as aides for Los Angeles Unified, the brothers were for two semesters taking 31 academic units apiece. To take that many units, they had to enroll simultaneously at three colleges--Dominguez, Cerritos College and East Los Angeles College.

“That was the most we ever took at one time,” recalled Cesar, who works as an aide at Corona Avenue School in Los Angeles. “Usually, we averaged anywhere from 18 to 30.”

Cesar Quezada finished college in three years, getting his bachelor’s degree in December from Dominguez Hills. He is looking for a teaching job and getting ready to begin classes for his teaching certificate, which he figures will take about a year to obtain.

The need for bilingual teachers is so great, McGowan said, that school districts hire the students as soon as they get their bachelor’s degrees, letting them teach full time while working on their teaching credentials.

Jose Quezada, who, like his brother, was an honors student at Bell High School, took a little longer than his brother to get his college degree. But he recalls exactly when he decided to become a teacher. “I was in the 11th grade,” he said. “I dropped out.”

His teachers, Jose Quezada said, were not “fulfilling my needs,” so he took the state high school equivalency test, passed it and enrolled in college before his peers had their high school diplomas. He said he decided on a teaching career because he reasoned there must be more students like himself who wanted more inspiration from their teachers.

Jose Quezada is already teaching at Farmdale Elementary school in Los Angeles, near his family’s El Sereno home. Both brothers say their experience as aides has been invaluable.

“That’s where I learned to become a teacher,” Jose Quezada said. “College didn’t teach me. . . . Aides are the ones who handle the problems the teacher doesn’t think are problems or doesn’t see.”

Cesar Quezada concurs. “If I had never been a TA, and I had to teach for the first time, I don’t know what I’d do.”

That is the beauty of the Dominguez Hills teacher’s aide programs, said Dexter Bryan Jr., a sociology professor at Dominguez Hills and a founder of one of the aide training programs. The program, funded by the state, is known as ATT, or Aid To Teacher.

Teachers who were aides, program organizers say, will likely have a leg up on other new teachers, many of whom quit within a year or two. Bryan points out that teachers are often educated at middle-class, Anglo schools. “They have no idea what it’s like teaching in these port-of-entry schools, so they leave quickly,” he said.

Maria Ott, an administrator for Los Angeles Unified, calls the aides perfectly suited to bilingual teaching. Ott helps oversee the Latino Teacher Project, the program co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation at Dominguez and two other campuses, USC and Cal State Los Angeles.

“They have that natural proficiency in the language,” Ott said of the aides, “and many of these students are actually living in the community. . . . That’s a big plus because they offer a cultural sensitivity and knowledge that really enhances everything else they do.”

Moreover, aides who become teachers can be role models for youngsters.

“There is a humongous need” for role models, said Arnoldo Lindo, 24, an aide at Monroe Junior High School in Inglewood and a participant in one of the Dominguez programs. “Once you get down to the trenches, in the classrooms, you get to work with those students. . . . You realize how important it is to them to have someone to relate to.”