Latinos, Civil Rights Groups Sue Orange School District

A coalition of Latino parents and civil rights organizations has sued the Orange Unified School District over its plan to abandon bilingual education.

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

Plaintiffs in the suit also include parents from Orange County, Los Angeles and Fresno who allege that the district’s action is an “illegal, wasteful and unauthorized expenditure of public funds” that could deprive students of “equal educational opportunities.”

Cynthia Rice, a staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance who helped prepare the case, said Monday that a wide range of plaintiffs were named out of fear that the move to end bilingual education will have a virus-like effect, spreading to other California school districts, 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 granted for one year--permitting the district to proceed with its new policy and setting the stage for the battle to resume next year. Three smaller districts, also in Orange County, have gotten similar waivers in the last two years.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday, is not the only potential challenge to the Orange district’s policy. The Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education recently sent the district a letter expressing serious concerns about the dramatic shift in how schools teach students with limited English who require special education.

Orange Supt. of Schools Robert French on Monday defended the 29,000-student 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,” he said.

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

“Fifty languages are spoken in the homes of my students,” French said, “and 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 to comment further pending a court hearing Wednesday in Sacramento.

Deborah Escobedo, staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Multicultural Education, Training and Advocacy, which represents the plaintiffs, on 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.”