From 1976 to 2001: English as a Second Language Program
August 10, 2001 - Of the almost 100,000 Wake County Public School System students starting school this year, 4,000 will be students whose native languages are not English. That's a big increase over the 400 students with limited English proficiency Timothy Hart found here 21 years ago when he arrived to direct WCPSS's English as a Second Language (ESL) program, whose teachers help these students learn the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and become proficient in English.
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Hart, senior administrator for ESL, foreign language, and foreign exchange students, began serving Wake County students in the program's infancy in 1980. "At that time ESL was really a new area, even nationally," said Hart. "The documentation I have shows that there was a program that had begun back in 1978. There were about 300-400 students being served. I think there were five schools: three elementary, one middle, and one high school. They served the entire school district." The students were primarily children of North Carolina State University professionals, resettled Vietnamese refugees, and foreign workers in the Research Triangle Park.
Twenty-one years later, the program has become much larger.
"At the end of the (2000-2001) school year we ended with about 3,500-3,600," Hart said. "Some of those kids have graduated and people have moved, so our numbers are always down a little bit in the summer. But if we continue at the 20 percent growth that we've seen over the last five to six years, we'll be at around 4,000 students in the program this year."
As for the ESL program's demographics, Hart said, "It's the same people, but the ratios have dramatically changed. We always had a small population of Spanish-speaking children. But now, of those involved in ESL here in Wake County last year, 58 percent of those were Spanish-speaking. The majority of those were children whose parents are Mexican. Often, these children come with interrupted schooling or little schooling, and that's made it very different."
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In response to the growth, which has spread across Wake County, Hart and other administrators have sought to bring the services closer to the children. "Instead of trying to keep everything contained in what we called "center" schools, we'll have programs in half of the schools in Wake County. It helps all schools and teachers understand that everybody's responsible for the children, not just the ESL teacher. The children should be served where they would normally be served if they weren't Limited English Proficient (LEP)." The role of the ESL teacher has also evolved, from teaching "survival English" to working with classroom teachers to show them how to differentiate lessons, working with social workers, and sometimes acting as translators.
Hart also has a part-time job training future ESL educators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at UNC-Greensboro. "They come with questions. They come looking for stuff they want to apply immediately. For many of them it's not just theoretical." Many veteran teachers seek additional ESL licensure because they had already had students with Limited English Proficiency in their classrooms, and wanted further training.
Hart clarified that English as a Second Language education is not bilingual education. "ESL teachers understand language development -- both the first language that the child had at home and how a second language develops. They're able to take that child from concrete to complex, from simple to abstract, and help them develop their English skills, also by using the Standard Course of Study. This isn't a bilingual program. Spanish, for example, may be used incidentally, but we don't teach English through the use of Spanish."
When the language breakthrough hits, it can be an amazing thing to watch, Hart said. "Teachers may be concerned about a student that doesn't seem to be generating language, then sometime after the winter break they come back for a few weeks and then it hits, and they're generating all this language. Theoretically, we know the reasons why this hits. It's called a silent period; it's not that the student is not paying attention. They're taking in the language and trying to figure out, either consciously or subconsciously, how it works."
One of the challenges facing Hart and WCPSS's ESL teachers is striking a balance between the needs of Spanish-speaking students and those with other backgrounds. "For every Spanish-speaking child we've got three quarters of a child out there who speaks another language," Hart said, adding that the number of languages spoken natively among Wake County's students changes weekly, averaging about 100. " There are children from all over. Different kinds of tribes in Africa, Afrikaans, Arabic, all the way up to a couple of kids that reported their first language as Icelandic -- and everything in between."
Hart pointed out that the ESL program feels the effects of disasters and conflicts from across the globe: "When the Russians first started in Chechnya, only three months later we saw for the first time the Chechen language pop up here. There were refugees. Somebody has families here and that brings people through. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan back in the 80s, we had more Afghans here. When there was a big hurricane in Central America about three years ago … in three months, people were coming here from Honduras and Nicaragua. It's pretty predictable. We're going to get, in Raleigh, some sort of fallout from whatever world incident happens. It may just be a few families. In some cases, it's more than a few.
"Our goal is to help these children to get a diploma. We have to approach it with the expectation that these are children who are going to be living here in Wake County and we want them to be able to handle English to be productive citizens here."