BURBANK : Schools Seek Waiver on Language Rules

The Burbank school board, unable to find qualified teachers in Arabic or Tagalog, has applied for a waiver from a state requirement to provide academic instruction in those languages.

A district with more than 50 students not fluent in English who speak a particular foreign language must provide academic instruction in that language, said Andrea Canady, director of the district’s curriculum and bilingual education programs.

In the past two years, more than 50 students with limited English who speak primarily Arabic and Tagalog, a major Filipino language, have enrolled in the district.

Officials cited the difficulty in finding qualified teachers, along with the unavailability of teaching materials and the lack of concentration of students as reasons it would be impractical to teach such classes.

“Another problem is that the state has no training program in this area, anywhere that I know of,” Canady said. “There’s no way for a teacher to get credentialed in those two languages.”

In a district of nearly 13,000 students, there are 174 Tagalog-speaking students, 56 with limited abilities in the English language, and 172 students speak Arabic. Of those, 95 have limited English abilities, Canady said.

Instead of receiving instruction in their native languages, these students are grouped with peer tutors, more advanced students speaking the same native language, Canady said. Even though the district is applying for a waiver, Canady did not rule out the possibility that there may someday be academic instruction in those languages.

The only bilingual instruction now offered by the Burbank Unified School District is for large populations of students speaking Spanish, Armenian and Korean.