BURBANK : Latinos’ Concerns Over School Linger

In response to legal action on behalf of Latino parents, the Burbank Unified School District agreed in April to diversify a board of parents, teachers and staff who oversee educational programs at William McKinley Elementary School.

But a month later, dissension remains between school officials and the Burbank Human Relations Council, which represented a group of Latino parents in a complaint filed last year with the state Department of Education.

In the complaint, the council’s then-vice president, Lila Ramirez, said parents had been intentionally left out of a decision to make a sudden, mid-year change to McKinley’s bilingual program by segregating primarily Spanish-speaking students for part of the school day.

The council also filed federal claims that the district discriminated against parents of minority children, as well as some potential applicants seeking administrative and teaching jobs. The federal investigation is still pending.

Meanwhile, the district has agreed to help expand and diversify McKinley’s School Site Council, which meets every other month. Principal Caroline Brumm, who joined the school in September, takes credit for helping the council grow from as few as four members in 1994 to 22 this year, and says she has already accomplished much of what the district promised to do.

McKinley’s School Site Council now includes Brumm, six teachers, four other school employees and 11 parents--five of whom are Latino.

“I don’t want to stir up much negative garbage about this thing,” Brumm said. “But I think I’ve done everything to come into compliance with this law.”

Although the School Site Council reflects the ethnic makeup of McKinley’s student body of 620 better than it did before, Ramirez said she is concerned about the difficulty Latino parents appeared to have joining the committee.

“The Latino parents had to fight to get on there,” she said, adding that many were not informed of when vacancies would be available.

At McKinley, language-arts lessons used to be taught in bilingual classrooms that included Spanish-speaking students with limited English skills.

But last February, the district restructured those two-hour sessions, teaching Spanish-speaking students in the first, second and third grades in separate classrooms from their English-speaking classmates. Other minorities with limited English skills, however, were not taught separately.

District officials maintain the change was necessary to best serve certain students in the language they understand best. But some Latino parents said they wanted their children to learn English alongside English-speaking students.

The change remains in effect, Brumm said, and is not likely to be modified before the upcoming school year.