Student Candidates Join Bilingual Debate

Coral Ortiz felt pretty ​“connected” to the discussion topic at her first ever Board of Education meeting: how to improve bilingual education in New Haven.

A teaching assistant for a bilingual class, the Hillhouse High School rising junior said she wishes more teachers were aware of English-language learners’ (ELL) needs in the classroom.

Ortiz and other candidates for high school student positions on the Board of Ed sat in the audience during Monday night’s meeting — all hoping to win the upcoming first-ever election and join board members at the table this summer.

Six of the seven confirmed candidates met with Mayor Toni Harp, Superintendent Garth and city alders earlier on Monday for a rundown of the election process and to get tips on how to run a solid campaign.

The best advice Ortiz got during the session was a ​“method of being aggressive, but not in a way to intimidate people.” Making personal connections with other students is the best way to campaign, she learned.

After a 2013 citywide charter revision referendum, the city’s eight-member Board of Ed is going from being a mayoral-elected body to a hybrid board, with four mayoral appointees, two members elected by the public and two non-voting student members. The Board of Alders finalized the ordinances guiding the election process in late March. The election for the student seats takes place June 4; voters will choose the adult members of the board in the Nov. 3 general election.

One rising junior and one rising senior will serve on the board. Four rising seniors and three rising juniors turned in their petitions by the May 7 deadline, gathering 50 signatures from students at their school and 50 from students at five other New Haven public schools.

Those seven students are: Ortiz, Wilbur Cross rising juniors Martin Clark and Jada Mcaulay, Sound School rising senior Kimberly Sullivan, Metropolitan Business Academy rising seniors Jesus Garzon (pictured) and Isabel Quezada, and High School in the Community rising senior Caroline Ricardo.

One student submitted her petition and then ​“had to rescind” it, said Suzanne Lyons, representing the Board of Education on the election committee. Two others did not get the requisite number of signatures by the deadline, but still would like to be able to campaign.

The election committee will have to look into ​“clarifying at what point they were aware of the process,” Lyons said, and decide whether to allow them to campaign.

Among nine returned petitions, students collected 1,147 signatures from 11 different schools — at least 700 of which were not repeated, Lyons said. Due to a convenient coincidence, all of the rising juniors are at neighborhood schools and the rising seniors at magnet schools, meaning both types of schools will definitely be represented on the board.

ELL Myth Busting

Students Monday evening were able to witness the way a typical ed board meeting functions, including the delayed call to order several minutes after 5:30 p.m. And they sat in on a newer procedure — a meeting of the Teaching and Learning Committee, formed this past fall, in which board members publicly discuss specific educational issues.

Pedro Mendia-Landa, the district’s ELL supervisor, first took the board through a rundown on existing district initiatives to help students who qualify for extra help to learn English. A few schools in Fair Haven such as Clinton Avenue School have dual language programs, in which the elementary school’s students trade off weekly between English and Spanish classrooms.

(Click here and here to read about Clinton Avenue’s offerings for English language learners.)

The district has expanded its portfolio of schools for ELL students, but is sorely lacking in teachers trained to provide ELL instruction, he said.

The number of ELL students has significantly increased in the last four years from 2,448 to 3,390 this past fall, he said. Last year, the district ​“exited” 70 students from the ELL program and this year that number increased to 270. The students speak more than 50 different languages, he said, but New Haven only has Spanish/English bilingual programs.

The state allocates 30 months — about three school years — for ELL students to learn in bilingual classrooms, before schools move them into classrooms taught fully in English.

And the funding for ELL offerings has stayed the same or decreased over the years, said Imma Canelli, assistant superintendent.

She called on experts to bust a few myths about English-language learners.

Most were born and raised in the United States, said Gladys Barbosa Labas, co-chair of the state’s Achievement Task Force for English language learners. She is pushing to increase that 30-month period in bilingual classrooms to 60 months — ​“not that much … but better than 30.” (Read more about that issue here.)

And districts can hire more bilingual teachers if they are more flexible about certification, Labas said. She came to the U.S. in the 1970s through an exchange program with the University of Puerto Rico and was able to teach almost immediately.

Sometimes, parents decide to opt their kids out of those 30 months of bilingual education, thinking speaking a different language at home will be enough to keep kids bilingual, said Southern Connecticut State University professor Angela Lopez-Velazquez. But students need in-depth instruction in both languages to be able to use them to communicate in depth.

ELL students can easily attain basic communication skills in English, but lack deeper proficiency in the language. ​“Uninformed teachers may see a sutdent learning English as a fluent child because he can speak English and has no accent,” she said, ​“but the child is not doing well in the academics. The teacher wonders if there’s an academic issue with the kid.” In Connecticut, this leads to teachers labeling many ELL students as having special education needs.

But students take at least six years to show results, Lopez-Velazquez said. She calls ELL students ​“emergent bilinguals.”

Board member Alex Johnston said the presentation helped him shift to thinking about bilingual students as ​“assets.” He said that ​“for students coming to us who already have a leg up, it seems unfair that we would cut that leg out.”

Sullivan, a candidate for the student ed board position, said schools should ​“target individuals” and not assume students’ needs by extrapolating from racial background alone. She said people likely assumed she did not need English language learning resources, because she is white.

But, she said, her family qualifies for free lunch and her mother raised her and her sister alone with no college degree. When her sister had a ​“hard time reading, they put her in an ESL classroom because it was the only resource available to help her,” Sullivan said.

Superintendent Harries said the district has to learn how to combine its efforts at improving literacy in both ELL and non-ELL groups of students. ​“It’s not one against the other,” he said.

Past coverage:
•Students Launch School-Board Campaigns
• Slow Start To Student Race For Ed Board
• Final Rules Set For Hybrid Ed Board Elections
• Rules Set For ​“Hybrid” Ed Board Elections
• Students May Petition Way To School Board
• Grades, Attendance Still On Table As Factors For Student Board Of Education Hopefuls
• Students: Grades Shouldn’t Matter For Board Seat
• Should Board of Ed’s Student Rep Earn Cs?