Suit Challenges Halt to Bilingual Teaching

Setting the stage for a possible statewide showdown, a coalition of Latino parents and civil rights organizations has sued the Orange Unified School District over a plan to abandon bilingual education.

The suit in Sacramento Superior Court seeks to block the Orange school district from dismantling its traditional bilingual education program, in which about 2,000 students are enrolled with another 5,000 receiving “limited English” instruction.

The plaintiffs include parents in Los Angeles and Fresno, who, along with those in Orange County, criticized the district for what the suit calls an “illegal, wasteful and unauthorized expenditure of public funds” that deprives their children of “equal educational opportunities.”

Cynthia Rice, migrant staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, said Monday she was afraid the district’s actions would have a “virus-like effect” in spreading across California, especially in rural communities.

“The vast percentage of migrants in California have children whom this action threatens to affect,” Rice said from her office in Santa Rosa. “If a district as large as Orange can get away with this, other districts will soon follow suit. It’s like this huge wave of anti-immigrant sentiment washing over California.”

Orange’s plan, which district officials say will cost about $125,000 to put in place, requires teachers from kindergarten through third grade to use English almost exclusively in the classroom, with some help from bilingual teaching aides.

Earlier this month, the state Board of Education voted 5 to 2 in favor of letting Orange drop bilingual education for one year.

That fell short of the six votes needed to permanently abolish bilingual education in Orange, but under state law, a waiver was immediately granted for a year, setting the stage for the battle to resume next year.

Plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed Friday, have received moral support from the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education, which recently sent the district a letter raising “serious concerns” about a “dramatic shift” in how schools teach students with limited English who require special education.

Reached for comment Monday, Superintendent of Schools Robert French defended his district.

“After careful study, we’ve determined there is no evidence that bilingual education has been the least bit effective, anywhere in the United States, for the last 30 years, while millions of dollars have gone into it,” French said.

Calling bilingual education “a disservice to children,” French said the soon-to-be-instituted English fluency program provides “a far superior educational opportunity” for all the district’s students, one-third of whom are Latinos.

The state Board of Education granted the waiver to Orange July 10. Three smaller districts, in Westminster and Anaheim, also have gotten waivers in the past two years. Previously, other districts across the state also had experimented with alternatives.

Orange’s waiver takes effect Friday.

“Fifty languages are spoken in the homes of my students,” who number more than 29,000, French said. “Why should we offer instruction in one and leave out the 40-something others? It isn’t right, and it isn’t fair.”

French declined further comment, pending a court hearing Wednesday in Sacramento.

Deborah Escobedo, staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy, Inc., which represents the plaintiffs, Monday called French’s assertions a “slap in the face” to a third of Orange’s student population.

“These children have the right to learn English--and also math, science and other subjects,” Escobedo said. “Immigrant parents don’t want their children so preoccupied in the quest to learn English that they receive no instruction in anything else--and never recover.”

The lawsuit coincides with state lawmakers considering the latest in a series of efforts in recent years to reform a system that is desperately short of qualified teachers and under fire for failing to move students rapidly to English fluency.

English-only advocates also are gathering signatures for a proposed 1998 statewide initiative to dismantle bilingual education.