Success in Any Language : Education: Channel Islands High honors Spanish-speaking students who have excelled in innovative bilingual program.

Awaiting her second straight award as the most outstanding bilingual-education student at Oxnard’s Channel Islands High School, Adriana Jasso sat through the ceremony Monday with one eye on the speakers and the other on her geometry textbook.

“I have to get my homework done,” the 18-year-old senior said in accented but flawless English.

An achiever and proud of it, Adriana is one of about 300 immigrant students who learn English at the high school in an innovative program designed to speed their integration into American society.

Until arriving in this country from a small Mexican town three years ago, Adriana spoke no English. Although she hadn’t attended school since sixth grade, she was placed in the 10th grade based on her age, a school official said.

Now the slender 5-foot student has a 3.82 grade-point average, a varsity cross-country letter and ambitions to attend UC Berkeley.

“I want to better myself for me and my family,” said Adriana, whose father is a field worker. “I want to do something.”

According to bilingual-education officials, Adriana and others can attribute their success to a key element in the program: Core courses such as math and science are taught in the student’s primary language, allowing students to keep pace with their English-speaking classmates.

In most other bilingual programs, students are placed into core courses that are taught in English, said Clifford C. Rodrigues, an official specializing in bilingual education for the county superintendent of schools office.

“Channel Islands goes beyond that,” Rodrigues said. “Their (bilingual) kids are right up to their grade level.”

While the other four high schools in the Oxnard Union High School District also have bilingual programs, Channel Islands “is the flagship,” said department head Paul Abravaya.

The bilingual program is in its third year at the 2,600-student school, the county’s largest high school. District officials said they have not yet gathered statistics comparing those students to the school’s general school population or to students at similar programs at the other high schools.

But Assistant Supt. Gary Davis said the Channel Islands program “has been very effective keeping (grade-point averages) very high and building student self-esteem.”

Honored Monday along with 39 other bilingual classmates, Adriana is an exceptional student, but her up-by-the-bootstraps attitude is typical of most of her classmates in the program, said social science teacher Lisa Villanueva, who will head the department next fall when Abravaya returns to teaching science full-time.

“The bilingual kids always do their homework and never miss school,” Villanueva said. “They care about succeeding. To them, there’s more at stake, so they take school more seriously than other students who have been here all their lives and don’t see the relationship between education and future success.”

Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, who helped originate the awards program three years ago, was a presenter during Monday’s hourlong ceremony, which took place in the school cafeteria at 8 a.m. When the buzzer rang, a few hundred students were quietly sitting in their seats. Afterward, Flynn remarked “how beautifully the students behaved.”

Because they take most of their classes together, the students are almost in a school within a school and develop a camaraderie of their own, Abravaya said.

But they also melt into the general population by taking regular physical-education and art classes and participating in varsity sports and extracurricular activities, Abravaya said, adding that bilingual students are less likely to join gangs or become dropouts than mainstream students.

The assimilation of bilingual students, most Spanish-speaking, is also helped by the large number--61%--of the school’s students who are Latino, school officials said.

There are also about 250 Vietnamese students at Channel Islands, officials said. The 20 to 25 Vietnamese students in the bilingual program don’t have a bilingual Vietnamese-speaking teacher and have to make do with a teacher’s aide who speaks Vietnamese.

But this limitation hasn’t stopped Phu Nguyen, a 19-year-old junior only 2 1/2 years removed from Vietnam. Taking the third level of a four-level English program, Nguyen won an award Monday for writing. Speaking English slowly after the ceremony, he recalled how hopeless he felt when he first arrived at the school.

“I very scared,” he said. “I not know anybody. I have no friends. Nobody told me how to get to class.”

Now he feels he fits in. “I very lucky,” said Nguyen, who hopes to study drama. “I have friends now. Some friends born here. Something I don’t understand, I ask them and they explain.”

Channel Islands has more bilingual-education teachers than the district’s other four schools, officials said. The staff of 14 gets high marks from students.

“The teachers are very sensitive,” Adriana Jasso said. “They understand where we came from. It’s people like that who were willing to let me become someone.”