Prop. 227 Foes Vow to Block It Despite Wide Vote Margin

Undeterred by the large margin of victory for Proposition 227, opponents of the ballot measure designed to dismantle bilingual education moved Wednesday to block it in both the courts and the classroom.

Even as a coalition of civil rights groups filed a federal court lawsuit, another hoped-for avenue of relief from Proposition 227 was closed down when State Board of Education officials said requests for exemptions from the law would be rejected.

Eight school districts--including those in Oakland, Fresno and San Jose--have filed papers seeking a waiver from the proposition’s requirement that, after one year in English immersion programs, most children must be taught almost entirely in English.

But the state school board’s attorney has advised it that it is powerless to grant those waivers. “We will be strongly discouraging the board from looking at waivers at all,” said Bill Lucia, executive director of the board.

Meanwhile, as school administrators were trying to sort out what it would take to comply with the law, which takes effect in 60 days, as many as 1,500 Los Angeles teachers said they were prepared to commit the equivalent of educational civil disobedience if necessary.

The initiative “forces us to be saboteurs,” said Arturo Selva, a veteran first-grade teacher at Bridge Street School in East Los Angeles. “The bottom line is, are we going to be here for the children or not? Once you close your door, people who don’t believe in English-only are going to sabotage it.”

A South Orange County school is considering a move to become a charter school to save its two-way English-Spanish immersion program. And across the state, educators were left to try to work out how this broad new educational policy would play out in the classroom.

Anaheim teacher Debbie Lutz conducts most lessons in English. But once in a while when, say, a double-digit subtraction problem stumps her second-grade students, she realizes that it’s the language tripping them up, not lack of math skills. So she sprinkles in a few words of Spanish, and the cloud of incomprehension lifts.

On Wednesday, however, Lutz wondered whether that was still allowed.

“Will I still be able to do that, or could I be liable for speaking Spanish in my classroom?” Lutz asked, honestly puzzled.

Not all teachers opposed the initiative, of course. In Los Angeles, for example, 48% of 20,000 teachers voted earlier this year for a union resolution in favor of 227.

Doug Lasken, a fifth-grade teacher at Ramona Avenue School in Los Angeles, who was among the measure’s most vocal proponents, said Wednesday the chaotic aftermath of the vote that some are predicting can be avoided.

“It’s unfortunate that we had to go through the initiative process to get this,” Lasken said. “But it wouldn’t have happened had anybody within the educational community--including teachers unions and school districts--been capable of reforming this badly functioning program.”

Defendants in Suit

The state school board is named, along with Gov. Pete Wilson and state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Council of la Raza, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the American Civil Liberties Union and groups representing Asian Americans. It seeks an immediate injunction to block implementation of the proposition, which would take effect in time for the start of school in September.

The coalition filed its challenge in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claiming that the terms of the initiative violate the civil rights of 1.4 million California children who are not fluent in English.

The lawsuit will be heard by federal Judge Charles A. Legge, a moderate Republican appointed to the bench in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan. It alleges that Proposition 227 violates federal constitutional guarantees of equal protection as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Eastin opposes the proposition but issued a statement vowing to carry it out. State Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, who as a candidate for governor opposed Proposition 227, will have to defend it in court.

Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley millionaire who wrote the initiative and spent heavily to see it passed, said a team of private lawyers, whom he declined to name, also is ready to defend the lawsuit on a pro bono basis.

The proposition was opposed by President Clinton, all four candidates for governor, the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties and almost every education organization in the state.

Yet it still won big, with 61% of the votes cast, making it one of the most popular contested initiatives in the state’s history.

The proposition did particularly well among Republican voters, 77% of whom backed it, according to a Times exit poll. Only 47% of Democrats sided with the measure. It was opposed by voters who considered themselves liberals, and by blacks and Latinos. But white and Asian voters were in favor, as were older voters, the exit polling showed.

“What it means is that the people of California very strongly believe that children should be taught English when they come to school, and that overcame the opposition,” said an ebullient Unz.

About 1.4 million of California’s 5.6 million school children are not fluent in English. About a third of them are taught using their primary language to build conceptual knowledge in subjects such as math and history while moving them toward fluency in English. But some become stuck in such bilingual classes and never develop the linguistic skills needed to succeed academically.

Unz said he was confident that the legal challenges to Proposition 227 would be rebuffed and that “this marks the beginning of the end of bilingual education in the United States.”

On Wednesday, however, educators pondered the massive changes that will be required to switch the state’s educational system to a new track. Everything from purchasing the proper textbooks--if they are available--to retraining teachers must be tackled. Educators say they are still figuring out how much explanation teachers can offer in languages other than English.

Many questions remain, such as: How should the mandated one-year English immersion program be designed? When must it begin? Are bilingual aides strictly prohibited? Are foreign language courses affected? Will bilingual teachers, once a hotly sought commodity, eventually lose their pay differentials?

“I don’t think, right at this moment, there is a consensus on what specifically the implementation will mean, if it happens,” said Al Mijares, superintendent of Santa Ana Unified School District.

Most districts are waiting for guidance from the state Department of Education. Others are beginning to make decisions based on suppositions.

In Santa Ana Unified, the Orange County’s largest district, three-fourths of the students speak limited English. Officials project that many of their long-established bilingual programs will be slashed if the law is upheld. Even high school students who are still taking classes in English as a second language may not be allowed to take a foreign language.

In complying with the law, Santa Ana administrators may need to lay off staff and figure out how to make do if the district loses federal funds it had received to help support bilingual programs.

Even the Westminster and Orange Unified school districts, among the first in the state to gain exemptions from previous bilingual education codes, could find their existing programs, which provide some native-language support, endangered under the law.

“We’re in an, ‘Oh, my God, we don’t know mode,’ ” said Tracy Painter, Westminster’s director of special projects.

Through waivers, Westminster and Orange schools have been teaching students only in English but have provided bilingual aides to help translate. Those aides might be prohibited under the new law, Painter said.

But Robert French, superintendent of Orange Unified, decided to interpret the law to mean that districts will be allowed bilingual aides and to continue using them.

South County officials fear losing their two-way immersion programs, which allow students from various language backgrounds, including English, to learn both English and Spanish.

“Our program was not the focus of the Prop. 227 initiative, but it was caught in the middle,” said Silvia Pule, principal of Las Palmas Elementary in San Clemente. “We have legal counsel looking at it now.”

Gates Elementary in Lake Forest may resort to applying for charter school status to save its 9-year-old two-way immersion program, Principal Mary Jacks said.

Anaheim City School District officials wonder how they will move their students who are used to bilingual teaching to a year of pure English instruction. In a district where roughly 60% of its students speak minimal English, reforming its programs will be a mammoth task, administrators said.

“Logistically, it’s like a nightmare,” said Mary Austad, principal of Abraham Lincoln Elementary School in Anaheim.

The district also spent several million dollars last year on new bilingual reading textbooks. Do those go in the trash now, administrators asked?

If bilingual instruction is scrapped, officials at various Anaheim campuses are drafting creative ways to provide after-school bilingual help.

Lincoln Elementary, for example, could expand its after-school homework club to include more students. It also intends to increase the hourlong morning English language classes for parents.

At Pasadena’s Madison Elementary School, Principal Gloria Gutierrez Delaney said Wednesday, “We have parent conferences in Spanish. I send out a weekly bulletin in English and Spanish. Will I still be able to do that?” asked Gloria Gutierrez Delaney, principal of Pasadena’s Madison Elementary School.

San Francisco’s Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday to continue bilingual programs and to join any legal action to overturn the proposition. “It’s an absurd measure which has no educational basis and would set our students back 30 years,” said board President Carlota del Portillo.

Proposition 227 allows parents to request that their children receive bilingual instruction. It even allows schools to recommend that students need more assistance before being transferred into mainstream classes. But school districts will have to work out procedures for making such decisions.

L.A. Contingency Plan

The Los Angeles Unified School District had developed a contingency plan that contemplated such possibilities as busing children whose parents want them in bilingual classes to new campuses, transferring teachers who are untrained to teach children not fluent in English and even adding a year of schooling to make up for the one year during which students will be concentrating solely on learning in English.

But Supt. Ruben Zacarias issued a statement directing staff members “not to change any procedures or methods of instruction” until further notice.

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Times staff writers Peter Hong, Jim Newton, Liz Seymour and Doug Smith contributed to this report.