NY Times August 5, 2002
By YILU ZHAO 
 

MAGNOLIA, N.C. - A wave of immigrants in the last 10 years,
particularly in rural areas far from traditional
immigration hubs, has left school districts across the
country desperately short of people qualified to teach them
English, school and government officials say. 

The number of students with limited English skills, most of
them Hispanic, has doubled, to five million in the last
decade, data from the United States Department of Education
show. That is more than four times the rate for the general
student population, according to the National Clearinghouse
for English Language Acquisition, a federally financed
nonprofit organization. 

The number of qualified teachers for bilingual or
English-as-a-second-language classes - already in chronic
short supply - has not kept pace. Market Data Retrieval, a
group that keeps national education statistics, has counted
50,000 such teachers in the United States, or one for every
100 students with limited English skills. 

If students with limited English skills were to be taught
in classes of the average national size - about 17 pupils
per teacher - up to 290,000 teachers would be needed for
them, said Dr. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a Harvard education
professor and an expert on immigrant children. 

"We are now in the largest wave of immigration in the
history of the United States," Dr. Suarez-Orozco said.
"This is not just a New York issue, or a Boston issue, or a
Los Angeles issue," Dr. Suarez-Orozco said. "It's a
national issue." 

The need for teachers of English as a second language has
grown most rapidly in school districts in the South,
Midwest and Northwest. North Carolina, whose farms and
factories have drawn thousands of Latino immigrants in
recent years, has had the fastest growth of students with
limited English skills. The number of such students in the
state has more than quintupled since 1993, to 52,500 from
8,900. The populations of such students in Idaho, Nebraska,
Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia have at
least tripled since 1993. 

Many of these districts, particularly those in rural areas
with few native-born bilingual residents, are offering
bonuses, loans and other incentives to teachers, and in
some cases poaching from neighboring districts. 

"Educators have started to realize that this is not just a
blip on the map," said Delia Pompa, the executive director
of the National Association of Bilingual Education. 

The urgency of their searches is compounded this year by
new federal legislation requiring students with limited
English skills to take standardized assessment tests by
next spring. Most states now exempt such students, and
including their scores with those of other students could
drag down a school's performance, with potentially dire
consequences. The new legislation, for example, allows
parents beginning this fall to remove their children from
schools designated as failing, moving state and local
dollars with them. 

School recruiters interviewed in Washington State,
Wisconsin, North Carolina and Kansas said that while many
regular teaching vacancies can attract 100 applicants or
more, openings for teachers of English as a second
language, or E.S.L., rarely attract more than one or two. 

Rural communities and small cities are devising ingenious
ways to recruit teachers. Some districts in North Carolina
try to persuade landlords and utility companies to waive
deposits for them. A district in Utah offers $2,000
bonuses. Kentucky forgives some student loans. Recruiters
from Denver have trekked to Mexico. 

Many districts have also designed "grow our own" projects
to train high school and college students, teaching aides
and even immigrant parents to teach English as a second
language and, more rarely, bilingual classes. 

Students of English as a second language study subjects
like math, science and social studies in English, often in
regular classrooms, while learning English intensively for
a few periods a day, tutored in individual or small-group
pullout sessions. Students in bilingual classes are taught
the subjects in their native languages. Because it is
difficult to find people able to teach subjects in other
languages outside the nation's immigrant hubs, few states
offer true bilingual education. 

Carol Theesfeld, the director of English as a second
language and bilingual education for the Kenosha, Wis.,
school district, says she never goes on a vacation -
particularly to the Southwest - without her business cards.
 

Ms. Theesfeld, whose district's population of students with
limited English skills doubled in the last four years, to
more than 400, says she approaches college-age people she
meets and asks if they study education. "You never know,"
she said, chuckling about her desperation. "You might find
a teacher this way." 

Ms. Theesfeld also recruits at more than a dozen education
conferences, at universities in Wisconsin and Illinois, at
ethnic festivals like Milwaukee's annual Mexican Fiesta and
at restaurants. 

Occasionally, some Wisconsin districts have created
tensions by poaching teachers from neighboring districts,
said Narciso Aleman, a professor of curriculum and
instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater
who maintains close ties with recruiters in surrounding
districts. 

"There are raids between districts," Dr. Aleman said. "The
recruiters would offer better pay, shorter hours, smaller
classes, all-expense-paid trips to national E.S.L.
conferences - anything they can to attract certified
teachers." 

Here in Duplin County, N.C., Hispanic immigrant children
make up nearly a third of the 700 students at Rose
Hill-Magnolia Elementary School, a one-story brick building
next to a turkey processing plant. Their parents have come
from Mexico and Honduras to pick tobacco, feed and breed
the hogs and pack turkey meat. 

"Some people here think they shouldn't be here and let's
send them back to where they came from," said Darrell
Grubbs, the principal. "But the reality is, they are going
to stay. And if they are going to stay, we've got to
educate their children." 

In explaining this point to resentful residents, Mr. Grubbs
does not cite the United States Supreme Court's 1982
decision in Plyler v. Doe, in which the court ruled that
public schools must educate all children, whether they are
in the country legally or not. He simply says that these
children are going to enter the work force some day and pay
"your Social Security." 

Seeing the increasing likelihood that every teacher at some
point will encounter a student for whom English is a second
language, a small number of principals have required all
their teachers to take some E.S.L. education classes. 

Close to $400 million was funneled in 2000 through the
federal Office of Bilingual Education, since renamed the
Office of English Language Acquisition, to help districts
put candidates through college or night classes to receive
E.S.L. or bilingual licenses. This year, the office plans
to hand out $665 million in grants. 

The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, along with its
surrounding school districts, is one recipient. Its "grow
our own" project has recruited dozens of teacher's aides
already working in the districts, most lacking college
degrees, to enroll in tuition-free classes to earn a
bachelor's degree and an E.S.L. license. The school also
courts local high school and college students showing an
interest in this kind of education. 

The strategy might just reduce the high teacher turnover
rates, administrators from the nearby Janesville school
district say. Rural and small-town school districts, they
say, have found it hard to beat the excitement offered by
bigger cities like Madison and Milwaukee. 

In Fort Atkinson, Wis., a small town tucked in soybean and
corn fields, Vicki Wright, the district's
English-as-a-second-language coordinator, answers telephone
calls frequently from panicky teachers encountering
non-English-speaking students for the first time. 

Ms. Wright, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970's,
recalled some of the questions: " `How do I grade them?
They don't speak English.' `What kind of assignment should
I give them?' `How do I modify my tests for them?' " 

She said she also tries to correct a misunderstanding among
teachers, most of whom grew up in a place previously
populated almost exclusively by descendants of Polish,
German and Scandinavian immigrants. The district, which had
eight non-English-speaking students two years ago, has 65
today. 

"The regular teachers' attitude often is, let's hand the
E.S.L. student to the E.S.L. teacher and say, `Here is an
E.S.L. student. Now fix him.' " Ms. Wright said. 

"Now, what would you do if he were your own child?" she
asked. "They're not just the E.S.L. teachers' kids. They're
everybody's kids."