Suit Cites Impaired Children Aided by Services : Courts: Class-action challenge to new law describes cases such as a deaf girl in the state illegally who learned sign language in special classes. Co-author of measure says legal tactic is dishonest.

Opponents of Proposition 187 say there are at least 300,000 reasons to keep fighting against the popular new law. Barbara Ayala is one.

Barbara, 15, is an illegal immigrant who would be forced out of school by the measure and a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits filed to block it. Hearing- and speech-impaired, she was unable to communicate with others until her parents brought her from Mexico in 1992 and enrolled her in special classes at Alhambra High School.

“I felt that I could not talk, people did not understand me,” she said Thursday, speaking through a sign-language interpreter. “Now I can sign. . . . I feel free.”

The suit naming Barbara is one of at least eight legal challenges filed since Tuesday’s passage of Proposition 187, which denies public services to illegal immigrants, including about 300,000 students statewide. Legal experts say it is too early to tell whether the suits will ultimately be combined.

For her parents, Cipriano and Andrea Ayala, the lawsuit is the latest chapter in a lifelong quest to help their daughter. The trek began, they said, with incessant tests and ineffective treatments when she was a toddler. It continued with the decision to abandon good jobs and family in Cuernavaca for an illegal hike across the border and an uncertain future.

“We heard that education would be better for her in the United States--that there were special programs,” said Andrea Ayala, who left two grown children behind when she came north. “We came for our daughter.”

Barbara’s father, who traded a journeyman contractor’s position in Mexico for entry-level work in a factory here, said the sacrifices have been worthwhile. “It was really very, very small, that sacrifice,” he said.

Backers of Proposition 187 say that peppering lawsuits with emotional stories such as Barbara’s is a clever but dishonest tactic to influence public opinion. A boy identified only as Gregorio T. in the suit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has encephalitis that will be terminal, the suit says, if he is denied medical care. Another has had a kidney transplant and allegedly will not survive without rigorous follow-up care.

“They pick out the horror stories, the hard-luck cases,” said Alan Nelson, co-author of the new law and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Of course, if I was on the other side, I’d be doing the same thing.”

These hardship cases are the exception, not the rule, and they are not this country’s responsibility, Nelson said. In addition, he said, disabled illegal immigrants such as Barbara may be taking special education slots away from legal residents.

However, current state law requires that public schools accommodate all students with special needs. Alhambra’s superintendent of schools, Heber Meeks, said there is no waiting list for the Alhambra High program.

Special education students are among the most expensive to educate. On average, a student costs the state about $3,400 a year, and hearing-impaired high school students cost at least $1,000 a year more, state education officials said.

Because Alhambra High keeps classes small in its special education program and Barbara Ayala also takes regular classes--with a personal interpreter--the tab for educating her is higher than $6,000 annually, according to Assistant Supt. Dianne Saurenman.

Barbara is blissfully unaware of that cost.

In Mexico, she attended school only with hearing-impaired students and the teachers required them to read lips. She never learned to sign there and conversed as best she could with her parents and a few close friends in a combination of a gestures, grunts and note-writing.

“It was very frustrating,” she said Thursday. “I felt oppressed.”

Here, she eagerly shoulders a full academic load--math, science, history and English--as well as taking cooking and physical education classes. She is learning to work on computers and envisions that skill as leading to a possible career. She has more friends here, she said, many of them deaf.

At times, her father said, he finds himself relying on his daughter. She can read English signs and labels. He cannot.

Barbara’s attorney, Fred Kumetz, said Thursday that he initiated the class-action suit after he met the Ayalas through another client and was touched by their concern for their daughter. Under federal court rules, Kumetz can be paid for his efforts by taxpayers, but only if he wins.

“(Money) is not the motivation,” he said. “I was born in Mexico. This is an important issue to me.”